It's wilderness. Most places you could land if you land somewhere random are. The sun - if it's the same sun - is high in the sky, like he's travelled quite far or for quite a long time. It's quiet. Songbirds are warbling.

Well. There was a very small but real chance that something like that might happen. Isarn's on a lot of ley lines. 

Félix, still on his shoulder, squawks. 

"Quiet, you."

       "This doesn't look like the martyr's park."

"I'd noticed."

       "If I teleported you someplace that was supposed to be martyr's park, and wasn't, I'd bet anything you'd be squawking." 

"Go ask those birds over there where we are." 

South of the smoke! North of the forest! 

Félix flaps back.

           "I vote we move away from the smoke." 

"You know, I told Lucien we should grant the franchise to familiars, but I don't think he thought I was serious." 

            "Don't be cute, boss." 

So they'll head south. 

They see no smoke, then. Félix, who can see from a better vantage point, will eventually spot a fortress; stone, reasonably well-made, built into a hill overlooking the plains that they're presently trudging across. It'll be a long walk.

How long? Élie can take an hour to prepare Mount, if it's worth it. 

Yeah, this will take them most of the day to walk.

Alright, then. Magic horses. 

When he's been riding for the fortress for perhaps ten, fifteen minutes, Félix spots a large number of mounted riders coming out of it. Perhaps unrelated; they'd need extremely sharp-eyed scouts, to have spotted him at this distance. He's a lot smaller than a fortress. Félix can't pick out individuals in the departing party.

Lots of things have sharp eyes. 

Élie's horse is magic and will last approximately two hours. Their horses are real. If he tries to escape, this is not a race he will win. 

He'll angle to ride towards the scouting party until his horse gives out. 

They catch up to him about when the horse is running out. They're - not human, though they could pass at a glance. Too tall, too uniformly young and beardless. The horses are too large, too. They're armed, obviously, and wary, just as obviously.  

On whose authority do you travel here? someone asks him Telepathically, once they're close enough he can hear their horses' heavy breathing. 

The fuck. Telepathic communication is possible, but usually only for powerful wizards – who'd just cast Tongues instead of wasting 6th circle spell on talking to someone right in front of them. 

Aloud, he asks Félix – "Did you hear that?"

Telepathically he responds: If I am trespassing, I did not intend it. I'm here because of a teleportation accident. I don't know where I am. I do not wish you harm.

And, privately, he prepares himself to notice if his mind is being read. 

They're definitely reading his mind. 

A teleportation accident.

Élie really hates having his mind read. He's also decent at not thinking inconvenient thoughts when it's happening; he's had enough practice. The trick is to focus on something else, something that can easily absorb the natural push and pull of his thoughts – some question, like, how the Hell did he get here. 

Yes. I've never heard of this happening with a dimension step before, but of course it's not impossible, just rarer. I suspect I stepped in a leyline – I do try to keep track of all the major ones around my home, but we've seen a great deal of magical combat lately and sometimes that causes them to shift – I'm from Isarn, in Galt, in northern Avistan. 

A longer pause. I have never heard of any of those places, the voice says.

Could you speak aloud in - whatever language is spoken there?

"My name is Élie Cotonnet, of Isarn, and that's an interesting question. As I am a citizen of Galt, and a patriot, I'd say that it's Galtan, though if you were to ask my old Chelish schoolmaster he'd tell you it's a degenerate dialect of Avistani, and probably have me whipped – and most of the rest of the world would say we were both speaking Taldane." 

He can repeat that telepathically. What are the not-quite-humans doing with their weapons?

They're mostly keeping spread out like they expect that if he's something dangerous the weapons will be of limited use; a few of the ones in a distance do have a bow drawn on him.

It's hard to tell which one is speaking, what with the telepathy. They're all in nice uniforms - extremely nice uniforms, actually, silk dyed a deep red with effortful detailing on the sleeves and collars - but the uniforms don't immediately betray who is in charge. 

These are nations of - men? People of your own race? 

"Men – as in, humans? Mostly. My nation, Galt, also has halflings and tieflings and the odd dwarf or half-elf or hill giant. Other species are more common in other nations, though humans are the majority in most of the ones I've heard of. What are you? Where is this? Would you also speak aloud in your own language?"  

An even longer pause. 

"We call our people Quendi," says (and sends) the one in the lead, "and the continent Beleriand, and the world Arda. There are humans, here, but - not nations of them. I ...don't think we'd have missed them, if there were some. I don't think the Enemy would have, either."

"Now I'm much more confused about how I got here. The kind of magical accident I thought I was in isn't known to transport people between planets. The world I'm from is called Golarion. I've never heard of a species called Quendi, though there are many things I haven't seen. I do not know of any language like yours. 

...We do have – if I've got the sense of it right – an Enemy, but I'd be very surprised if they were the same." 

And the man dismounts. "I propose that you come with us," he says and sends, managing to maintain at least a trace of ambiguity about whether that's an order.

"It seems I can do very little else," he says and sends. "Félix, the gentleman asks us accompany him." 

(In fact, there's one thing he can do – try to make his will save against the mind reading and see if it gets a reaction). 

It works. Not instantly, like he threw off a single casting of a spell; it's more like, once he starts trying, he can actually just slowly but surely fence that presence out of his head, if he wants.

If it was possible for them to get even more tense, they're even more tense now. No one demands he do anything else, though.

The tall Quendi picks Elie up and places him on the horse, as if he weighed about as much as a five year old at his first pony riding lesson, and then jumps up behind him.

"Your language is very beautiful," he offers, once he's done so. "This is probably a trick of the enemy somehow, but we didn't know him to have much of an ear for beauty."

On the one hand, this is objectively a terrible decision. On the other hand, Élie really hates having his mind read. He'll fail his will save when they ask. 

He's also very sure that's not how making a will save against Detect Thoughts works. 

"Thank you! I agree. I'm partial, of course, but I really think no other language has as much depth and richness of expression as our Galtan. We take great care to cultivate it."

That earns a smile! A convincing one, even! "That is a priority of ours in our own speech as well. Quendi like beautiful things. It is one of the most notable differences between us and Men."

"That's strange. In my experience, humans like beauty a great deal. There are those who say we shouldn't need it, that it's pointless, but generally they're the servants of my Enemy and don't want us to have anything good in our lives at all." 

"- huh. Maybe the nature of the humans we have around here is the work of the Enemy; he did try to get to them first. And he does hate beauty. 

...who is your Enemy."

"We know him as Asmodeus. He is the god of tyranny, slavery, tormenting your inferiors, subjugating yourself to your betters, harsh discipline, deceptive contracts. He rules over Hell – what we call the Lawful Evil plane. On Golarion, his servants also rule the nation of Cheliax – of which Galt was a province, until five years ago.

He is very powerful – Golarion isn't the only planet he concerns himself with – but I'm reasonably certain he can't do anything to change our inherent natures. At least, not while we're living. If that power existed here I would be very interested, and very frightened, it's not something even our gods are capable of."  

"Melkor took Quendi prisoner, long ago when the world was new, and tormented and distorted them so the children they bore would be of a different race, brutish and ugly and agonized and His servitors, called orcs. We don't know what he aimed to do with Men, but - the ones we have live in ugly houses and wear ugly clothes."

Élie's reasonably sure that's not how new species come into being, but it feels a bit early in the relationship to start questioning what are obviously his captor's deeply held religious beliefs. 

"Most humans live in ugly homes where I'm from, too. Most people are very poor. Is this not the case for Quendi?"

"Most Quendi couldn't live in the conditions humans live under. If we are without resources we sleep under the stars. - we aim to give humans beautiful things and good lives too."

Élie's brain noticed when the Quendi said that there are no kingdoms of Men, and when he started talking about "their" humans. It's not so different from the way certain Chelish people talk about halflings – the ones who'd never beat their slaves or deny them food (at least, not without very good reason), but who don't think they're capable of living independently either. The Quendi are larger and stronger, possessed of unknown magical abilities, probably healthier, probably longer-lived. Obviously, humans are a sort of subject race to these people. The reasonable, pragmatic thing to do here would be to humor them until he has a better sense of what form that subjection takes. 

Élie's mouth says, "Why aren't they capable of making beautiful things themselves?"

" - well, they don't live long enough, mainly, and don't know how, and don't have time to learn." He doesn't sound offended, at least. 

"A healthy human in Golarion might live seventy or eighty years, if they don't die in childhood. Are the ones here very sickly?"

" - if they don't die young and don't get sick they make it around that long - well, I don't think I've heard of eighty, but sixty or seventy. ....which is a very short life. Many arts take centuries to master."

"I'd distinguish between skill and genius. A gifted artist might be able to spend centuries refining their ability to execute their vision, but a child of twenty is no less likely to have that vision than a sage of six hundred – and very likely more. We probably agree that perfect craftsmanship without artistry is nothing, so the question is how much great art loses for lack of craft. I think that, past a certain level of technical skill, the rewards aren't so great. Otherwise elderly artists would uniformly produce better art than younger ones, and that's not so."

" - well, humans also get worse at everything as they age; among Quendi it's true that older artists are near-universally better than young ones."

"Possibly humans and Quendi like different things in their art." 

"Well, I haven't particularly noticed that, but I don't actually work with humans, really."

Interesting. 

"Do humans and Quendi live apart, then?"

"Well, yes. We can't stand their villages, and they have young children to raise and so need to be back of the front lines. There are human units of soldiers, of course, but not many mixed units; they'd slow us down."

...that raises some questions. 

"Do all humans live in villages or are there larger cities somewhere else? Who governs them? Who governs you? – do Quendi not have children?"

"We haven't figured out how to have humans in cities without truly appalling rates of death from disease, so they live in villages. They are governed by our King, as are the Quendi. Quendi don't have children in wartime. It's not - the way we do things, to bear a child into a world that you haven't made any good for them, a world where they might die or worse. Of course if humans felt that way they'd just die out, so I suppose it's lucky that they don't."

Translation, humans are easier to control when they're poor and ignorant and divided. It's clever. It's also pointless. If humans reproduce and Quendi don't, then they'd be ruling a slave population much larger than their own, and that never works for long. 

Still, he should probably be offended. He isn't, really. It's a defect in his republican spirit, but he can imagine being a thousand years old and watching generations living and dying as children, not thinking of anything more than a couple decades in front of them – 

"No. No. It's not lucky at all."

His interlocutor perhaps can't think of anything polite to say to that; agreeing and disagreeing both seem fraught.

They ride on. The horses are vigorous and healthy, and the riders seem tireless. After a while they all start singing, a sweet fast-paced song with an eight part harmony they're presumably coordinating telepathically. The song has some magic in it, hard to immediately identify.

Okay but Élie is really good at identifying magic.

Can he see anything when he casts Detect Magic? Does the strength of the effect seem to vary with the rhythm? He's seen a couple of musical sorcerers with the armies – not so often that he understands how they work, but enough to get a rough sense of how the mathematics of spellforms can be expressed melodically. Is it anything like that? 

It's ....not something he'd be astonished to see someone do at home, some kind of weird sorcerer, though more powerful for the fact they're all doing it together. It's not a recognized Golarion spellform. It might be doing something akin to the spell Bear's Endurance, presumably mostly for the benefit of the horses? It's in any event not messing with his head.

Yeah, that's most of what he wanted to know. 

Does it look like it requires all eight voices, or would it work with any one of them, just weaker? 

It could probably be done with one? Certainly it doesn't look like it requires specifically eight.

See, that's really interesting! Golarion spellforms, at least the kind he knows, are much more self-contained – there's no way to add more wizards to a spell to make it stronger. He will very happily spend the rest of this journey trying to figure out how that works.

At any rate, it keeps his mind off the things he'd rather not think about. 

He hasn't made all that much progress by the end of it. - it's an entirely different style of spellcasting! -  but no one seems to mind his repeatedly casting Detect Magic to watch!

The fortress is ...beautiful? Someone clearly put years of their life into naturalistic floral crenelations, and into polishing the marble inner walls until they shine in the setting sun. There's a thick wood door, criss-crossed with metal for reinforcements, and it's been stained a deep mahogany, with gold detailing, while the metal has been polished to a shine. The interior of the city echoes with song, and as they enter someone scurries out behind them to brush away the mud from the horses' footsteps.

Élie believes that the purpose of art is to convey the inner feeling of the artist, that the ability to capture the spark of inspiration in paint or stone surpasses any technical merit, and that the beautiful is inferior to the sublime. 

But, fine, it's very nice. 

They lift him off the horse. "The Prince Curufinwë is riding in to meet you," says his host, dismounting after him. "He commands the defense on this border and has been - consulting on your identification. But he'll be another few hours. Do you need anything? Food, rest, a bath? What does your bird eat?"

        "To start, I'll take escargot a la bourguignonne – "

He'll eat whatever I do. Or else snails. 

"We're assuming you can eat the same things local humans can eat, is that probably a safe assumption?" 

"– I'd say so, with the  caveat that if your humans all die before they turn sixty it might not be good for any of us."

" - well, then. we should figure that out so we can feed them better too," the Quendi says with a trace of - stubbornness, maybe, or pride. "Ilmarë will show you to your rooms."

Ilmarë is a Quendi in identical uniform, with hair that is as elaborately braided (but differently elaborately braided), and she will lead him through a courtyard to a fairly luxurious room adjoining it. It has a spectacular glass sculpture hanging from the ceiling and one wall painted to resemble the ocean with astonishing realism.

He already admitted it was nice. Don't these people have a war to finance?

"Thank you. This is very lovely. If you don't mind, I would like to rest now, though of course if your commander wishes to interrogate me I am available at his convenience." 

"I imagine you'll be notified when he arrives." And she hands over a tray with some bread, and fruit, and nuts, and roasted meats, and dumplings, and then withdraws. 

Félix wants the nuts. 

Élie, now that he's thinking about it, really would like a bath, but he's not about to call the Quendi back. Besides, the bed looks very soft, and he's very tired after all that riding –

They let him sleep, but only because there is a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations now being had, and because the commander of this fortress really wants to be fluent in Galtan Avistani by the time he meets the new arrival.

He's going to have a very limited vocabulary to work with. Not that Élie knows any of this. 

Yes, and he's annoyed about it!!  They should have carried on a lot more inane out loud conversation so that he had more to work from!! Why in the world did they stop discussing art and aesthetics with the rare human who'll evince interesting opinions on the subject??

        "Because, my lord, I was worried about offending him! He has magic for transportation between worlds! I didn't want to cause some kind of - cultural misunderstanding to do with the fact our local humans are - unsophisticated and stupid -"

"If we suspect we've offended him, we give him to the King. The King's not going to offend him."

        " - yes, my lord."

Someone ELSE should go in when Elie wakes up, then, to get him a little more to work with.

When Élie wakes, he's going to take a moment to remember where he is, decide to defer his breakdown about how he'll never see his home again to a later date, and look to see if there are any Quendi about. 

In the courtyard that his window opens onto! They are, predictably, singing, and also weaving.

Ooooh, is the singing magic?

It is!!! It's not the same song as they sang on horseback, but it's going to be hard to narrow it down further; the spellforms are totally unfamiliar and wouldn't stabilize for a wizard at all. 

Yes yes yes but they are recognizably spellforms! That means he can start coming up with a system for annotating them wizard-fashion and then see if he can use it to translate his own spells into music!!!

Once he's been at it for a while, the Quendi notice him, or decide to acknowledge they noticed him, and someone comes over with breakfast (the same as the last meal, mostly). "Hello," they say aloud and send, with a smile. "Did you rest well? Are you enjoying the music? We could arrange a concert, once you have spoken with the Prince Curufinwe and it's clearer what we should do next."

"What's it for? Something to help with the weaving, right? Does it make them work – faster? That's not quite right. Steadier? I'm sorry, I'm almost done with this bit." 

"- how are you guessing? From looking at the results? It makes the thread lay more evenly; it can be used for any work where you care a great deal about the consistency of your labor, each stroke matching the one before it."

"From looking at the magic and trying to guess what it would do if I were casting it. Which really isn't intuitive, I wouldn't do it this way and it wouldn't work for me if I did. May I have a bath before I meet the prince?"

"I'll have someone draw one up for you. Would you like a change of clothes as well?"

"I would appreciate it, but I'd imagine I'm too small for anything you'd have on hand."

"We do have humans here sometimes! We'll work something out while you bathe. How'd you find the food?"

"It was excellent. Thank you."

        "The roast was overdone."

"Félix thanks you as well."

The bird is the one they can still mindread, so this doesn't escape them at all, but he nods politely. "What...is Félix, if I may ask? Intelligent beings that prefer to take the form of an animal are very rare here." 

"Félix is a magpie."

      " – a very rational thing to be, too. I don't go around asking people why they prefer to take the form of elongated apes who can't fly." 

Slight smile. 

"He's my familiar. Wizards in my world have the ability to endow an animal with a portion of our own souls. It makes them sapient and allows them to assist us in our magic." 

" - huh! So he's -- part of you?"

"Possibly. What I've just said is the most common explanation, but – " 

       " – does it look like I'm part of him?"

" – the process isn't especially well understood. We don't share thoughts, he has his own goals and desires – "

       " – some people think that's just what you want and can't admit, but I say they're full of it – " 

"It's complicated." 

"Understood. The bath's ready, if you'd like me to show you over. Your world sounds like it has - fascinating magic. We are very lucky, that you arrived here." He does not entirely sound like he believes this.

That's fair, Élie's not totally sold on this either. 

"Please do."

He'll make small talk along the way, for the benefit of interested Galtan-learners. The bathing room is, of course, elaborate; the water is hot. They leave him to it.

Élie is also paying attention to their Quenya. He'd like to rely on the creepy inexplicable telepathy as little as possible, thanks. The bath's nice. 

They have some adequately human-sized robes for him by the end of the bath. They're lovely. Very comfortable. They have a tiny hat for Félix, too, if he cares to wear it.

       "No."

"Please. Please. You have to."

        "No way."

"But it's adorable – "

        "My point exactly."

"...I will prestidigitate it gold."

The supervising Quendi does not seem in a rush. In fact no Quendi so far have seemed in any sense in a rush.

When they emerge, Félix is wearing the hat. 

Then they'll show him to the Prince Curufinwë, whose office is - of course - spacious and luxurious with a view to the north and a painted-view of a lake under the stars.

"Elie Cotonnet," he says, in nearly perfect Galtan. "Thank you for joining me. This is a very strange situation; I confess some uncertainty what to make of it."

Oh, is this what we're doing? Fine. Élie will respond in worse Quenya. (And send his meaning telepathically, he's not that much of an optimist). 

"I wish I could make things clearer. I've already told your men what I know." 

His face - twitches, at that. And then he smiles, and corrects the Quenya. 

"I might even believe you," he agrees, cheerfully enough. "And yet it seems that this has to be the work of the Enemy, not that I have any idea what he gains by it. Can you tell me about - the place you're from, the human civilization?"

Élie can keep speaking Quenya, then. He doesn't like to embarrass himself, but the quicker he can master their language, the better it'll go for him. (It doesn't matter if they speak Galtan; until he speaks Quenya they'll still see him as a performing ape).

"There's a great deal to tell. What sorts of things would you like to know?" 

"All of it, really, but I suppose I'd start with whether the Enemy is at work there, and if so what you are doing about it."

"My civilization knows of many gods, some of whom are more more powerful than others, some of whom are more concerned with the lives of mortals on Golarion than others. Asmodeus is one of the oldest and most powerful of these gods – at least, his followers claim he is, but in this case I have no reason to doubt it. He rules over Hell, the Lawful Evil afterlife. 

About a century ago, another one of our gods was killed. This god, Aroden, was an ascended human. In life he had ruled over the empire of Cheliax; as a god, he protected it. When he died, it fell to Asmodeus's servants. Cheliax is a large nation, as we consider these things – about thirty million subjects. The sole aim of its rulers is to ensure that the greatest possible number of these subjects will be condemned to Hell when they die. I'm certain that Asmodeus has other interests on Golarion, and on many other worlds besides, but that's the one I'm most concerned with. 

I was born in Galt when it was still a province of Cheliax. Five years ago, we expelled them and declared our independence. We – I mean, my friends and colleagues in the Galtan government – would like to finish the job and drive the Asmodeans out of Cheliax entirely. Or make peace with them if they agree to recognize our independence. Or go even farther and make the whole continent and patchwork of sister republics – this is mostly academic, since we can barely hold our own borders as things stand. 

I don't know if our Asmodeus is your Enemy. Certainly they – rhyme." 

"Indeed. And yet I haven't heard of Hell, and we think our mortals go no where when they die, and it does not seem to be a great concern of the Enemy. And - 

- our other gods haven't spoken of this, of other worlds, and it would surprise me a little, if Melkor operated there without their knowledge. They'd imprisoned him for a time. I'd think that'd have affected his operations elsewhere."

"Then he certainly isn't Asmodeus. Maybe an archdevil, one of his more powerful servants.

Do you know that your mortals don't have an afterlife, or have just not found one yet? My civilization doesn't know if all mortals from all worlds go to the same set of afterlives, but we know they pull from more than just Golarion. There are spells known to us that could verify this, but I'm not powerful enough to cast them." 

"We don't know. We think they don't go to the place Quendi go to when our bodies are destroyed, but - we have very little ability to guess, beyond that. We have no spells that could verify it."

"Mortals on Golarion have nine afterlives. They correspond to the fundamental moral alignments, which I'm just now realizing might not be a concept you have – we've got two axes, Good to Evil  and Lawful to Chaotic, one can be neutral on either. The goddess Pharasma decides which one best matches the character we displayed when we lived. 

The Good and Neutral afterlives are – fine. Some of them are much nicer than others, and reasonable people might disagree about where they'd like to spend eternity. The neutral and chaotic evil planes are horrors, but most souls sent there get eaten by more powerful outsiders and permanently destroyed, so that's a limit to how dreadful they can be. Souls in Hell are just tortured for eternity. They tell us that the best and luckiest eventually become devils themselves – but Asmodeus is, among other things, the god of lies." 

" - well, all right. I guess once you've figured out how to kill one god you've probably figured out how to kill them all."

"We don't know how to kill gods. Mostly when they die it's because they've killed each other." 

"We don't know how to kill gods either but we were already going to need to figure it out."

"I don't see how that follows. The gods we know on Golarion have very different capabilities and some of them are probably much easier to kill than others, and then there are all sorts of similarly powerful things that aren't gods at all.

– Actually, we should disambiguate 'god' before we do anything else. In Galtan, the word just means an entity which can empower clerics. Is it the same in Quenya?"

"The word isn't familiar; nor is the concept if I'm parsing it right. The gods are the entities created with the world's creation to act on the will of the Creator; they do not have a physical form unless they want one, but do tend to have a bounded geographic area in which they can exert control directly."

"It is generally believed that our reality was created by Pharasma. She probably also made the very oldest gods; I don't see how else they could have gotten there. Some gods participated in creating Golarion, and the species that live there, and other worlds like it. Other gods started out as weaker beings who rose to godhood over many millenia. A few are ascended mortals. They aren't bound to physical forms like mortals, but it wouldn't surprise me if many of them happen to be operating some number of physical forms at any given time. Many of them have domains in one of the other planes where they're especially powerful. A handful rule over nations of mortals, almost always through mortal proxies. Older gods are usually more powerful, having more worshippers usually makes them more powerful, they usually have broad thematic spheres of influence, like love or farming or magic or torture. All of them can endow a select number of their followers with magical abilities – that's the thing that makes them gods." 

"We call our creator Eru. It's said that He orchestrated the world as music, and the other gods participated in singing it into being, and all that occurs is according to His plan. We have...only the gods we started with, as far as anyone knows. There are ascended mortal gods? Can they kill other gods?"

"One day, we hope, but I don't know that it's ever happened. The mortal gods are very young and very weak, as gods go. "

"How does one become a god."

"One touches a particular magic rock in the city of Absalom, on Golarion. Hundreds of people have tried this and almost every time it just ends with their immortal soul being destroyed, but four times it hasn't. Nobody knows why it worked in those specific cases.

There are a handful of ascended gods who did it some other way, but their stories are murkier. One of them purportedly just meditated until he "achieved perfection," but that's obviously a fairy-tale his followers made up. Another simultaneously ascended and went mad in the same instant, having glimpsed all the knowledge in the universe. Of course, we don't know what that means, or how he did it, or if he was even mortal to begin with." 

"What...properties does the magic rock have? Who made it? Have you seen it?"

"It was made by Aroden, the god who died. Maybe he did it using the forgotten magics of ancient Azlant, maybe he made it from the corpse of the last moon god, who sacrificed himself to save Golarion from a meteor swarm many thousands of years ago, maybe he dug it up from the center of the planet, maybe he did it with the help of a race of alien fish with vast psychic powers. Nobody knows, and nobody except the other ascended gods has seen it and lived." 

" - well, I guess it's more to go off than we had before. Do you imagine it possible to get to your world from here, however you got here in the first place?"

Oooh, Élie's been thinking about this! 

"Oh, it's certainly possible.

...I mean, I can't do it, I'm just sure it can be done. There are spells for traveling across planes and even between planets. I don't know them, but I could probably reinvent them given enough time. That's not the problem. The problem is that I'm much too weak to cast them.

That said – I had this idea when I was listening to your men sing. The kind of magic I know is never additive like that, the power of the spell is always entirely dependent on the individual caster. If I could just find a way to reset the spellforms I know so that they can be performed by Quendi sorcerers, you could just throw together a choir and get them to work that way. Or not! They might not translate! Or your magic-users might not be powerful enough even in concert." (Or it might take decades and only get him home once everyone he loves has forgotten him, but the Quendi won't care about that). "Still, with your blessing, I'd like to try."

" - the King's decision, given the stakes, but certainly - something I'd recommend to him, if you're as you seem and it's really chance that sent you. What do you mean, when you say you're too weak to cast them? Is it a matter of experience? Health?"

"A little of both. Spells as we understand them stabilize one of nine degrees – circles – of increasing complexity. To cast higher-circle spells, a wizard needs to be able to shape the spellform – that's really just a matter of intelligence – and also have a enough personal power to channel through it. We become more powerful by using magic at times of great danger or very high stakes. It's not unusual for wizards who haven't had the right kind of experience to be able to form spells they can't cast." 

Élie's had plenty of experience, of course, but nobody here needs to know he's defective. 

"And how much power would you need, to return to your world where the route to godhood is?"

"I'm not sure how to articulate it in terms that would be meaningful to you. Depending on where we are in relation to Golarion, it might be a seventh or a ninth circle spell. – If it's the ninth circle spell I really shouldn't be confident I can recreate it at all, but arrogance is one of my great flaws, ask anyone. " 

Élie doesn't feel the need the warn him again that if he touches the Starstone he will almost certainly die. He's a prince of some sort, he's probably got a few hundred conscripts he'd chuck at the thing. 

"Can other people learn your magic?"

"I can't think of an obvious reason why they couldn't." 

" - how it it learned, in your home world?"

"I'm not sure how I'd describe it to someone who's never done it – no, that's not true, it's somewhere between mathematics and very complicated knitting. I was taught in a class with many other students, but apprenticeships are more common outside of Cheliax."

"Are you willing to teach it to us?"

"I hadn't assumed I would be given a choice." 

Raised eyebrow. "Have you found our hospitality disappointing?"

"Not at all, you've been very gracious. But I have to imagine that my government has more concern for the freedom and self-determination of human beings than yours, and if we found a visitor from another planet with strange magics which we believed could turn the tide of our war against a tyrant god, we wouldn't let him walk away either."

"It is our hope that we can persuade you to fight our Enemy, because he's evil and torturing people and will kill us all if we don't defeat him and so on. I will confess the case seems compelling enough to me that I hadn't given much thought to what to do if you decide that you are in favor of letting him do it. Certainly we'd much rather have your help because you agree with our cause than because you are frightened of us."

"If you're telling me the truth I agree with your cause and will help you gladly, and, also, I'm quite frightened of you. Don't you think I'd be foolish to feel otherwise?"

"It seems to me that you are very valuable, and we ought to be willing to go to great lengths to protect you, and that we'd be very foolish to anger you."

"If you made me angry, the worst thing I could do is refuse to teach you, and if you have remotely reasonable priorities that's exactly what you won't let me do. I'm not worried for my safety just at the moment. Like I said, I really do want to help you. But if we're going to work together you should know that I dislike polite fiction."

Félix is starting to peck nervously at the side of Élie's head

          "Please shut up."

Élie pats his tiny head. 

"So does Félix, but he worries about me." 

" - all right. If you were to declare 'I don't want to help you stop the evil torture god who will kill us all', and I couldn't talk you out of it, and neither could anyone else, I'd get around to threatening you at that point, because I would think you were being stupid and childish - and I'd think the same of a Quendi who could help that much and was refusing. However, most people....want to stop the evil torture god who will kill us all.... so I don't really expect it to come up, and I am glad to learn that you also want to stop the evil torture god who will kill us all, and I am happy to collaborate with you towards that aim, and to pay you generously for your labor, and to arrange for you anything that might help you in it."

Back home Élie has a full time job trying to convince people it's worth their time to fight the Evil Torture God Who Will Kill Us All, and in fact wandered into Beleriand from a meeting about how to respond to the latest group of rebels fighting to restore the rule of the Evil Torture God Who Will Kill Us All even though the Republican armies are desperate and starving and no other nation in Avistan wants to help. Maybe Quendi are just more inclined to Good than the sapient races of Golarion. More likely, he's missing something. 

"There are no Quendi who aren't part of the war effort?"

"There is a nation of Quendi under the protection of their own minor god. They think they'll be fine if the evil god wins because their own minor god will, they think, be sufficient to protect them, as she protected them before we arrived. They don't let humans into their kingdom, though, so that won't work for you."

"I asked because most people who weren't born in the nation ruled by our own evil torture god don't seem to care much one way or the other. I was wondering if Quendi were different. I suppose I shouldn't be disappointed that people are everywhere the same." 

"We were born into paradise, where there are other gods who would oppose Melkor's actions within their territory. We left it when we learned that Melkor was ravaging Beleriand. I suppose not everybody left, though nearly all of the Noldor did."

"I would like some way to confirm you're telling the truth about all this and not just trying to conquer the next kingdom over." 

"Does your magic offer you that? Ours does, but I don't see why you'd take my word for it."

"I know spells for it, but can't cast them myself. I was hoping we wouldn't need to resort to magic, in any case, a full-scale war effort is hard to fake." 

"You are welcome to take a look at the war effort. Should I pull out a map?"

"Please. And I'd like to go out and talk to people, if I may.

– I do think it's fairly unlikely you're lying to me. It's only if someone who could read my thoughts was to invent a cause I'd feel entirely unconflicted about supporting, they couldn't have done a better job, and naturally that makes me suspicious."

"I cannot actually read your thoughts; our osanwë functions only by the will of both parties. Sometimes humans who haven't encountered it before have a mental default of permitting it, but if you were doing that initially - permitting it is the same from our perspective as selectively permitting it, so we aren't sure - you stopped before you arrived here."

"Ah. I thought I'd blocked it when I realized what you were doing, but I wasn't sure I'd succeeded. I can fail my will save again when you ask, I've been assuming you'd get around to that."

" - well, if you're willing, it would probably be helpful." 

"I'm willing, as long as it's for a limited period of time. 

– with the kind of mind-reading I'm familiar with, this would give you a fairly high degree of confidence in my intentions, but yours might work differently. For one thing, it's easier to shake off." 

"And to permit thoughts through selectively; that's what most people do, all the time, share the things they want to share and not other things."

"That's not possible with the kind of mind-reading I'm familiar with. If you don't want to share something, you have to not think about it. ...I'm about as good at this as anyone can be, which is to say, not very."

"That must have fascinating effects on a culture." He does not sound approving.

"You know, I'd never thought of that. Truth spells are more common and more convenient for almost everything. There aren't actually all that many wizards. Cheliax is probably the only place where the state subjects anyone to regular mind-reading, and even then their capacity's really quite limited. Most people who aren't nobles or magic-users or serving at the Worldwound probably never experience it."

"We don't have truth spells either. Is that something you can show us?"

"I can't. They're the kind of spell that the gods grant to their followers. Wizards haven't figured out how to do it yet." 

"Huh. What do wizards do to invent spells, anyway?"

Slight chuckle. "Complicated knitting." 

"...more seriously, we try to understand the relationship between the topology of different structures of magical energy and the effects they have in the world, and then experiment until we get the ones we want. At least that's what I do. I never was taught spell development and it's entirely possible that they've got some much more efficient method in Absalom." 

" - that actually sounds fascinating."

"It is! I feel very lucky to have been born in a world where the very fabric of reality bends itself to the exercise of reason. Also sometimes I'm wildly wrong and just make things explode." 

" - will you teach me?"

"I think I'd better if I'm teaching you magic at all, since I'll have to reinvent almost everything anyway. Will you show me how you come up with magic songs?"

"Gladly."

Aww, Élie likes him. 

...Élie likes him, which means he's in the middle of making an important strategic error. He's far from home, alone except for Félix, in the company of an ancient warrior-prince who thinks humans are a half-step above brute beasts – and he's been told he can use his unique magical knowledge to defeat an evil god. In this world, he's not a wash-out who can't hang second-circle spells. Here, he's the most powerful wizard in the world. He's being offered everything he's ever wanted by a man he should, under no circumstances, begin to trust. Magic's fun. He'd better keep his head. 

"I believe you were going to show me some maps, then." 

He has lots of credible evidence that his people are three hundred years into waging a war against an evil god. If it's faked they were very thorough. They have maps of Valinor where they started, and their first scouting maps of this continent and then the subsequent ones as they took back more and more of it, and maps of what they can learn of Angband from this distance, and records of food shipments and assignments and battles and incidents relating to released prisoners before they adopted the sad but necessary policy of just executing them on the spot. They have letters to and from Doriath, urging them to help with the war. They have contracts with the dwarves for weapons and ores and help with the war. They have complaint letters from the dwarves about late payments during a major battle for the north. They have so so many notes on all of the languages spoken by every people they've run across, including the petty-dwarves hated by the rest of the dwarves and the various tribes of humans and (though it's unclear if this part is a joke) all the local varieties of animal. They have plant and horse breeding records. They have decrees from the King on topics mostly related to allocation of resources for the war.

Élie needs to take 15 minutes to prep Comprehend Languages but after that it does look pretty credible. (That is, of course, what he expected). 

"What happens when you let the prisoners live?"

"Lot of them ask you to kill them. Lot of them ask you to - kill them so they won't even wake up in the gods's hands, which we don't know how to do. Some of them act normal and then one day stab their family, out of nowhere. Some of them never do that but if you ask them if you did them a favor, later, they  - they hate being asked that, so it's hard to know if you're getting a true answer, but they generally say no, not really."

"We don't know how to spare souls from the afterlives entirely, but we do have ways to capture them before they go. We're – almost certain they don't have any conscious experiences while they're trapped like that." 

"Well, you'd have takers. Not that many. We haven't had all that many captured and it's even rarer for them to be released."

"You said that Quendi go to the gods when you die. Does that include your Enemy?"

"No. We go to Mandos, and he restores us to life if he sees fit back in Valinor, where the other gods have power."

"At least it sounds like reinventing final blades isn't a screamingly urgent priority." 

He's got no idea how he'd being to reinvent final blades – they're proper Artifacts – but there are circumstances in which he'd spend the rest of his life trying. 

"We don't think much of Mandos but preferring to never wake isn't - the normal attitude about it. He sends you back, he just twists you up a bit first. And you can - untwist yourself, after a fashion."

"Our plan is to get everyone back."

"Well, I'm all in favor, but we will have to figure out that god-killing thing first."

"It's a ten or twenty thousand year project, isn't it? You Quendi have the advantage of us there. It's very difficult for humans to live in a world where our battles mean life or much worse than death for millions of people on the scale of years but the war itself takes millenia." 

"I imagine it would be very hard. One of my projects is addressing aging, so that humans would be around longer. I don't have it working, though."

"We haven't solved that one and I think we've got more to work with. Of course, it also looks less urgent. ...It does seem more likely than not to me that humans here go to the same afterlives we do. If that's so, eternal life is much less important than making sure they don't end up in one of the unimaginably horrific ones." 

"What causes that?"

"Being Evil. If you don't have this concept, the word won't translate well. It's a metaphysical quality baked into the nature of the universe, and Galtan doesn't have a separate word for things an individual speaker thinks are morally wrong. If you want to distinguish, you might say 'unvirtuous'." 

" - well, I think everyone's unvirtuous, by the standards of the gods."

"It would surprise me very much if your gods decide what counts."

"I certainly hope they don't. Are your gods ...less stringent?"

"Pharasma's the only one who decides. As best we can tell a bit more than a third of people end up neutral with respect to Good and Evil and bit less than a third end up at each extreme. The decisions themselves basically make sense. One could nitpick – and I do – but people generally sort evil because they do things like beat their wives or starve their peasants or have children in Cheliax when they know they'll almost certainly go to Hell." 

" - well, I don't think our mortals do any of those things. Probably some of them beat their wives?"

– Yeah, Élie's not sure why he expected the Quendi to be calibrated about this. 

"If I have time, I'd like to look into it." 

Of course, he'd also like to a get a sense of how the human subjects really live. Even a staged visit will be better than nothing. 

"Of course. I can have some people from the human military units brought here for interviews, if you'd like, or you can ride south to the villages; it's a few day's travel."

"I would like to visit the villages one day – " which he will be selecting, with no notice, when he no longer requires a Quendi interpreter – "but it doesn't seem like the most urgent priority just now. 

"As you like. I'll see who's nearest and if they can spare some human soldiers, and the villages can wait. We can make announcements that it's extremely important for everyone to not beat their wives? Separate the married couples? Is it specifically that or is that just a particularly characteristic sort of thing?"

It's not like Élie's never met anyone who's willing to stamp out essential freedoms to save their people from infinite suffering. Some of Élie's best friends are willing to stamp out essential freedoms to save their people from infinite suffering! Heck, Élie's been there himself. 

He doesn't think he's ever seen a person he could respect – someone who understands the stakes, someone driven by disgust and horror at everything Hell represents – offer to do it quite so casually. Bernat, the public prosecutor, took the job on the condition that when his time came he'd be granted the mercy of a final blade. Porras, the head of the censorship bureau, writes discourses on the liberty of the press, to be published when their Republic is secure. And Lucien – well, Lucien's the reason Galt won't have a constitution this year. But Élie knows that the evening after the vote, he wept. 

Of course, there are ultras. One of them had the rostrum when Élie stepped through a wall into Beleriand. Her speech was something about taking all the children of rebellious Iobére to be raised by good Republicans – or better yet, as wards of the state. The prospect seemed to excite her. Now that he thinks about it, hadn't he felt rather ill? Isn't that why he wanted to step outside? It's not the proposal itself he objects to so much as the ease with which she offered it. He's sure that woman did quite well for herself in Cheliax. 

Curufinwë doesn't seem like that, but he's been wrong before. 

"It's a characteristic example. I suspect you don't understand humans well enough to make useful determinations here. I'd like to know what your native concept of Evil is, and if it's at all similar to ours." 

" - well, there's - Melkor, right, enslaving and torturing people. But in Valinor, when we spoke of the evils Melkor had introduced into the world, we weren't talking about an epidemic of people enslaving and torturing each other. People who accused each other of evil meant - defying the gods. Desiring independence. Defending yourself. Having relationships the gods don't approve of. Making plans to leave Valinor. Demanding what was rightfully yours. Being willing to resort to violence even when your cause was just."

"None of those things are Evil as the people of Golarion understand it. Maybe resorting to violence? But that would depend on the case. If a starving orphan steals some candy from my pocket and I, I don't know, decapitate him, that's Evil; raising arms against a tyrant would be Good." 

" - right, well, that makes sense to me, but the Valar want everyone to believe raising arms against a tyrant is evil so that no one will overthrow them, or complain about them."

Élie is starting to put together a picture. The local gods are obviously, extremely Lawful Good. They've convinced themselves that any deviation from their own particular laws is Evil: that's a very Lawful Good mistake to make. The Quendi rebelled and now they think Evil means anything short of joining the Sacred Order of the Knights of Taranx whose members do nothing but bathe in ice-water, fight demons, and feed the widow and orphan on alternate week-ends. Delightful. 

"It seems like we have similar intuitions about what it really means for a person to be evil – which is interesting, since our words are so different." 

"I'm not sure we do! Or - I think we agree that gods of torturing people are very bad. But I suspect there are a lot of things that aren't - that - and it's not a popular topic, since the Valar went around twisting us all around their idea for so long."

" – Alright, here are some things that almost everyone on Golarion would agree are Evil: torture, murder, stealing from the poor, abortion, violence towards those in your power, raising armies of  undead, rape, bearing false witness. Most of these could be mitigated by circumstances. Reasonable people disagree about things like the line between beating your children and acceptable corporal punishment, or if there are any positive obligations it's Evil to deny. The general theme, I think, is cruelty. Evil is a lot of things, and if I had good definition I'd have told you already, but if I had to try – it's actions which stem from a refusal to see other beings as possessing their own autonomous rational will. Treating people as objects, if you like. 

Does this sound like a concept your culture has?"

" - not that doesn't also include in it 'disobedience to the gods' and 'war' and 'taking prisoners'."

"Making war and keeping prisoners aren't Evil, but people have a much harder time avoiding Evil when they do so. It's not unusual for Lawful Good entities on Golarion to decide that disobeying them is Evil and the rest of us tend to disagree pretty strenuously, but of course the empirical question is difficult to answer." 

"Then I suppose I know more or less what you mean, and don't see anything wrong with a little bit of Evil sometimes, once we've burned every Angband to the ground."

Élie wonders if this is what he'd be like if he'd been born in Lastwall instead of Cheliax. 

"I don't see any reason not to start on that immediately, then. I can speak to some of your human commanders tomorrow – incidentally, what is their language? – and in the meantime I'll prepare a curriculum. You should decide who can teach me your magic, and who ought to learn mine." 

"Thank you. I'll make those arrangements. They also speak Quenya, and we can arrange a translator if you need it."

That's very distinctly not answering his question. 

"Thank you. I hope that soon I won't need one." 

Then he'll round some people up for magic teaching and magic learning! And arrange for some nearby humans to come directly to his fortress to make friends with a human from an advanced human civilization! And then maybe he can ask some linguistics questions? He has a lot of linguistics questions.

Élie can answer them! He can answer them for Galtan and Chelish Taldane and speak at some length about how both languages grew out of ancient Azlanti! 

This is much more fun than trying to figure out how to teach a bunch of Quendi enough magic to be useful in the fight against their torture god without rapidly outliving his own usefulness. 

It is very apparently way more fun for him too. Lunch will be delivered eventually and other than that he'd do this all day.

Really. He isn't at any point going to make him do something more productive. 

....why? 

Torture god. They did just cover this. Not that he's going to complain.

Well, knowing all this vocabulary will help with learning magic faster and - 

- okay, maybe he just got distracted. Perhaps they should have a magic lesson.

...If it's at all possible he'd really like some time to think about the lesson. He could try and do it the way he was taught, but that's aimed at terrorized nine-year-olds and doesn't work especially well even for them. 

Sure! More linguistics, then. 

In the evening he lets Elie go with the promise the human commanders will be there in the morning. The King may also visit; details are still being worked out.

That's fine. Élie can go back to his room and scream. 

He's going to teach the Quendi magic, that's not in question. Their Enemy is clearly a servant of Hell, and he's opposed to Hell wherever he might find it. It's also clear that they'll use whatever power he gives them to maintain an alarmingly complete tyranny over their human subjects. The prince seemed very proud of his rebellion against their gods, but he probably won't like being on the other end of one. 

He wants to go home. It's not like the compromises were any better, but at least they were his, familiar to him since childhood. He doesn't like being ignorant. 

He also doesn't like wallowing. ...No, he's lying to himself, he likes wallowing very much, but if there's no one around except Félix to make him get ahold of himself then he'd better not start. He doesn't have to make any permanent decisions today. As long as he knows more magic than the Quendi, he has leverage. It takes humans five or six years of study to master first-circle spells. Of course, his Quendi students will be starting as adults, but that could go either way – and a species, they don't seem inclined to speed. He could re-derive a lot of spells with that much time.

He's more excited about his plane to use this world's native song-magic to power conventional spell-casting. Getting it to work might not be any faster than waiting for one of the locals to be able to cast Plane Shift, but it could change the course of the war back in Galt – if Galt still exists by the time he gets there. 

At this point, Félix hops into his lap and bites him. 

"Feeling neglected?"

        "You looked like you were about to have bright idea and I thought I'd better do something about it."

"Really?"

        "People might get hurt."

"...You know, if I didn't know you better, I might guess you're trying to comfort me." 

         "Lies and slander."

(He stays there for a long time). 

Curufinwë reports to his King. I like him. - you'll like him.

But will he like me? That seems like the crucial matter.

- are you in doubt?

Not especially. - get him some impressive humans. It was bothering him, how we treat them - I don't know why exactly -

He doesn't know anything about how we treat them!

 I don't know what he was picking up on, but he thinks that we're the Valar, or might as well be. I don't think you should have lied. I get the sense he's better at assuming we're lying than we in fact are at lying. Certainly than you in fact are at lying.

You want to come yourself, come yourself.

I plan to.

The next morning, Élie will have a lesson plan! He definitely didn't stay up all night with this. He made a particular effort not to stay up all night with this, since he needed to prepare spells this morning, but it was a near thing.

He's got a lot of opinions about magic pedagogy. 

He has an eager audience of ten Quendi much older than him, six men and four women not that it's particularly easy to tell, all of them very well dressed.

Are any of them proficient in their world's magic? 

Yes, they all know the song-magic. 

(Too bad. Élie was hoping he could get a sense of whether knowing one kind of magic made it easier or harder to master another). 

Chelish education is organized around the principles of strict discipline, competition, and relentless drills. A class of newly-identified potential wizards spend the hours of seven to noon on history, theology, and languages (Infernal everywhere, Azlanti and Draconic at the better schools), and one to five on mathematics and magical theory. Classes were large, so they'd be divided into groups of ten, with the ablest or most obedient student as decade-captain. These decade-captains heard recitation, administered exercises, and collected written work; they were permitted – and required – to administer minor punishments. Magic itself was taught by rote. Children learned cantrips by their component parts, mastering the mathematical formalization and energetic structure of each loop and whorl before assembling them, piece by piece. They would never be taught what these building blocks did or meant – they didn't need to know, as long as they could reproduce them perfectly. After a year or two, everyone in the class could. After a year or two, the class was much smaller. 

Élie's not doing any of that. 

He speaks over osanwë. May I share my vision with you?

Yes, he can absolutely do that.

Then he'll cast Detect Magic. And he'll ask one of the students to sing that song they'd been singing in the courtyard yesterday. 

What, just him? Okay. 

Yes, let's start with just him for now. Can the others describe what they see?

- oh, that's very cool. There are various proposed visualizations of the effects of magic, useful to composers, but they can't actually just see it. And now they sort of can, through Elie's eyes. 

They are delighted.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

He's asked for paper, colored string, and some soft clay to be on hand, if any of them want to try recreating it physically. 

Sure!

All Quendi, it seems, are gifted artists and sculptors.

That's convenient. Now another student – how about her? – should try singing something else. Don't tell him what it is. 

- she'll sing a song for swords to be swift and deadly in battle.

Huh. It looks kind of like Haste. 

"I'm guessing that makes attacks faster and more accurate. Something in that vein, anyway." 

- okay, they're very impressed at that.

(They should be, he's very good at this). 

When they've studied more magic, they'll also be able to look at the structure of a spell and determine what it does. He's still mostly guessing with their sort of magic, but in the system he knows these correspondences are well-understood. He can't cast two spells at the same time, but when all of them have learned Detect Magic he'll show them what that looks like. 

There is math that goes with this, and he'll get to that in a bit. For now, he wants them all to get used to working with magical structures. He's hoping the string models will help with that – it's dangerous to rely on them too heavily, but they can be useful for developing intuitions about how modifying spells effects their form. 

Someone should join the woman singing. Can anyone describe how the magic changes? 

With more singers, the magic works better; a wider spread, a stronger effect, more subtlety. This is a well known fact, though it's fascinating to actually see it.

Well, Élie's kind of flying blind here. Is it possible to achieve any one of those effects without the others? 

Not with this song? You could sing a different song?

Alright, let's try that. The idea here is to start noticing patterns in which structures correspond to which effects – he doesn't expect anyone to get very far with this today, but they should all start keeping notes. 

He can prompt them by describing the features he noticed that let him identify this song's function. It's hard to describe in words – shape is the metaphor most commonly used, but it isn't exact, and different people might perceive magical energies in slightly different ways (he once had a friend who swore he could taste it). 

They will cooperatively try lots of metaphors! Color and refractivity and smoothness and slipperiness and silkiness and translucency? (One gets the sense that a lot of Quendi education may focus on describing artwork.)

There is no right answer, they should try to identify a conceptual vocabulary that helps them manipulate these structures in their head. 

When everyone seems reasonably comfortable with this, Élie will project what Detect Magic looks like to him when someone else is casting it. 

It's beautiful!

It really is!!!

Now they're going to learn some introductory topology so they can formalize it. (They should stop him if they know this already – where he's from they teach this to ten-year-olds). 

They do not teach it to ten year olds here, and only the people with a particular interest in math are familiar with their world's version!

Okay, then he'll just do his best. They should stop him if he's going too quickly or too slowly. (He'd reassure them they won't be punished but he's not sure he actually has the authority). 

They don't actually seem nervous. They do seem - weirdly unhurried? Like 'going too slowly' isn't a complaint they'd have at any pace? They ask a lot of questions and don't seem to care that this slows him down notably.

They are pretty smart, so the end result is still a reasonable pace of instruction for an inexperienced math class.

Then eventually they will be done for the day. If any of them have comments on his teaching style and are worried about retaliation they can give anonymous notes to one of the servants or Félix (he can't really tell humanoids apart). 

...huh??

...Obviously he does not intend punish them but any teacher would say that on the first day of class, so he understands if they want additional reassurance! 

They'll ....let him know if they have any feedback.

That also works. 

He's brought a meal, and told the human commanders are there to meet him.

Élie doesn't really expect to get anything out of this while he's still dependent on an interpreter, but he can't exactly refuse. 

They are pleased and honored to meet him, this is the human commander of the people of Arror, a great early human hero who fell in battle with the Enemy. They are happy to answer any questions he has.

He's also pleased and honored to meet them. He'd very much like to know how the human villages are governed. 

Well, mostly the villages have a head, who reports to the Quendi, and makes sure that there are no problems with enlistment, and distributes pensions from the Quendi, and he's also the one who'd deliver a petition if there was need of one.

Which sorts of decisions does the head make, and which do the Quendi? What are some petitions they've delivered before? How are village heads selected?

How heads are selected depends on the village. Some do it as the son of the last head, or by having the last head pick someone, or by having all the elders pick someone, or by whoever gets along with the Quendi best. 

Petitions are things like that they should be sent grain because the harvest failed or that a gifted child should be taken to study in a Quendi city or that there's problems with wild animals. The Quendi decide whether to send grain or take the children or go wipe out the animals.

Élie's not going to ask about the quality of those decisions with Quendi in the room, because he's not a complete idiot.

Would they like to know about the society he comes from? 

They would! 

He was born in a placed called Mérue, a little town of about ten thousand souls, but mostly grew up in the city of Isarn. Five hundred thousand people live there, mostly humans. It's not the biggest city in his world. It has a university and parks and theaters and museums and opera houses and starving artists who live in garretts. It has cafés and mansions and apartment blocks and skilled artisans of every kind. It has chestnut trees, with branches that grow so heavy in autumn they hang into the river Sellen. 

Most importantly, it is governed by its people. Every adult in his country – it's called Galt – votes to elect a representative who speaks for them in the national assembly. They make decisions like who should fight in the army, or what to do if a province has too little grain, or how much money to spend on educating children. If the people aren't happy with the decisions their representative makes, they can choose another. They do it this way because the people – of Mérue, of Isarn, of Litran and Tournivel and Iobéré and everywhere else – are the ones who know best what they need, not some far-off monarch who doesn't even speak their language. A country governed in this way is called a Republic. Their Republic is very young, but it will last, and grow stronger. That's because a Republic makes its people strong. Instead of suppressing their natural talents, they're encouraged to use them for the common good. Rather than being kept ignorant, they improve their minds through free and spirited discussion of public affairs. It's a challenge, to be a citizen instead of a subject, but humans and all the other reasoning beings can rise to it. 

(So he devoutly hopes). 

That's so clever! Though...it wouldn't be a good idea to have humans in charge here because they flatly don't live long enough.

Maybe so. It seems to work on Golarion just fine and humans there don't live any longer. 

Well, how long is the longest the Republic has sustained a war effort?

His Republic's only existed for five years. But there are other human institutions which have existed for centuries. Some of them have even been fighting Evil all that time (though usually with some divine assistance). 

....huh. Well, that's really promising. Though they don't have...divine assistance? What would gods even help with, anyway.

Where he's from there are lots and lots of gods, and some of them are much more helpful than others. Mostly they grant their followers the ability to do useful magic, especially healing. 

Well, all the gods are useless or evil here. The useless ones don't want humans around because they aren't perfect enough and the evil one, well, enough said.

Back home it's mostly an Evil god who think humans aren't perfect enough and his go-to solution involves torturing them for centuries until they turn into his mindless servants. The helpful gods aren't powerful enough to defeat him on their own, but one day mortal beings will find a way to do it. 

Yeah, they're also working on how people can beat gods. It won't happen in any of their lifetimes, but it'll happen someday.

...Until that happens, it's very, very important that they avoid going to one of the Evil afterlives. 

....how.

This will have to be a longer, later conversation, when he's had more of a chance to see how they live. In the meantime – do they have a concept of Evil, distinct at all from the Quendi one?

....not really? The Quendi know a lot more philosophy and theology and so on.

Yeah, that's about what he expected. Then, for now – they should be kind. They should be generous to the poor. They should avoid using physical violence on anyone weaker than themselves. They should fight Evil, if at all possible, though it sounds like they're already on that. Babies get their souls some time between conception and birth and if they die in the womb they go to an immeasurable divine graveyard where if they're lucky they'll be raised by packs of feral children like themselves – so no abortion, and no infanticide. He knows that's not much help to a woman who can't feed another mouth, but sometimes the universe is that way. 

Oh, the Quendi are also against that. The Quendi say they should just live apart as husbands and wives, when they are not actively yearning for a new child, though it isn't easy if you're less patient than Quendi and the Quendi do also say that their large families are among their great strengths.

Yeah. Humans on Golarion aren't especially good at it either. (Élie is, though. He just has to think about his baby being eternally tortured and it immediately kills the mood). They do, uh, know about non-procreative sex, right? (He really hopes they do, because  otherwise he might die on the spot). 

Yes. Even Quendi do that, though it's not allowed in Valinor because the Valar are very picky.

How very odd. Of course, there's always situational homosexuality. 

Extremely not allowed in Valinor! They get the vague impression there was a whole thing about it at one point. The King has a male lover and it's...not mostly to spite the Valar, that would be absurd, but - whenever it's mentioned so is the fact the Valar disapprove, you know?

Huh. Well, it's not like none of his intimate relationships run on spite at the meddling gods. 

Is there anything else they'd like to ask him?

What sorts of things do humans do, when they run everything?

They pass laws. They levy taxes. They appoint judges, and carry out public works, and sometimes they make war. They build cities. They farm. They trade. They send troops to the gaping hole in the fabric of reality to keep the demons from pouring out and consuming all of civilization. They fix roads. They educate their children. They subsidize the study of magic. 

It's really very encouraging that they can do all that on their own.... except the demons thing. That one is just concerning.

Golarion kind of has a lot going on. 

Well, probably once these problems have been solved they will be charged with going and helping with the demons? Sounds important?

Yeah, probably? It's not the worst problem they have right now by any means, but when they've dealt with everything more serious fixing the worldwound should be pretty trivial.

They are not particularly good at, or inclined to, concealing that they find him very eccentric.

Félix volunteers that people find him eccentric where he comes from too. 

Oh good. They wondered if humans are just like that if they don't have Quendi to emulate.

Hmm. How do these people think Quendi and humans typically differ? 

....Quendi live forever, and probably because of that are better at everything, except they can't endure ugliness and their numbers won't grow. Quendi have telepathy. Quendi learn languages quickly. Quendi are more powerful singers. Quendi have seen the Light of Valinor, which strengthens them. 

...Quendi tend to be very unhurried about things and you can't rely on them to solve a problem as quickly as possible. Quendi offended the gods and humans don't think any humans have done that. 

Élie is confident that given the opportunity humans can offend the gods at least as effectively as any Quendi. 

....offending the gods seems bad. Otherwise the gods would be helping with the war.

In his experience, when gods want to fight other gods, nothing mortals do makes much of a difference either way. Of course, it does seem like the gods here are different from the ones at home. 

...what are the gods like, where he's from.

It varies. Some are good, some are evil, many are neither. Some of them care very much what happens on the material plane or Golarion in particular, others don't. Some of them are vast and strange and almost as old as the universe. Some of them used to be human. ...Possibly one of them used to be a rat who ascended after eating the moon, which he can't himself confirm but wouldn't exactly surprise him. 

It's hard to generalize about a group like that, and he can only speak to the subset of gods whose interventions on his home planet have been recorded in the his civilization's history, which might not be at all a representative sample. Still, he tends to think that gods are reasonably consistent in wanting the things they want. If Asmodeus is offended by his mortal followers, he'd certainly stop empowering them as clerics, and he might arrange to have them dragged into Hell, but it wouldn't make him any less opposed to the interests of Iomedae or Shelyn. 

Well, the way they understood it - and they may have misunderstood - is that the Valar would've helped, if the Quendi were obedient enough, but the Quendi weren't so the Valar mean to let them die, and the Quendi think the Valar are wrong and they can win without help.

Oh, well, if they're not that invested in what happens to the Enemy either way – does the Enemy have a name, incidentally?

Melkor? It mostly seems strange to call him by his name like a neighbor but it's Melkor.

Élie just feels strange calling him the Enemy when he's not his Enemy yet. Besides, if there's one thing the servants of Hell he's met hate, it's being called by their names like a neighbor. 

The Quendi seem unhurried about Elie's meeting with the other humans. They could stay for a few days if Elie wants. The humans, though, after a normal human length of conversation want to go rest and bathe and eat and then get back to their duties if he doesn't have more questions for them.

Élie, the accent's like so. And he doesn't wish to keep these people away from their families or their duties any longer than necessary. 

Then off they'll go, and he's back to being surrounded by Quendi, who communicate that the King will indeed arrive tomorrow to speak with him.

This will be interesting. He's never met a King before. 

Oh, the King is great, everyone likes him.

He's keeping his thoughts to himself, here, but monarchs who insist that everyone make a show of liking them seem scarier and probably less stable than the ones who don't care. 

He's also human and would like some time to eat and rest and prepare tomorrow's lessons. 

That's not a problem.

He eats. He writes down as much of the elementary mathematics curriculum that he can remember off the top of his head and makes notes about what he'll have to rederive. He tries not to think about how mortal beings, once the bare possibility of freedom is made known to them, cannot help but long for it. They've got an evil god to fight. He sleeps. 

The Quendi bring him breakfast, and notify him the King's arrival will be in the mid-afternoon, which should allow plenty of time for him to do lessons, if he wants, or get ready, if he wants.

The best way to get ready for meeting the King is to prove himself indispensable. He'll do lessons. 

He'll have a room of cooperative Quendi eager to learn cantrips.

That's great! 

He's going to start with the spell he demonstrated yesterday, Detect Magic. (Children on Golarion are usually taught Prestidigitation first, but he finds it much easier to learn everything else when he can see what he's doing). Many people consider mastering their first cantrip the hardest part of learning magic. They shouldn't feel discouraged if they don't get it this week, or this month, or this year – although he's getting the sense that they probably won't be. 

Indeed they seem to think it's not a big deal at all if it takes years! Most crafts do!

(Since this is all ostensibly useful for fighting their local evil torture god, it kind of seems like a big deal to him. Though perhaps Quendi learn as quickly as humans and just have higher standards for mastery). 

Today, they're just going to focus on the process of holding a magical structure in their mind and working it on the world. If there's a good way to teach this, it's not known to his civilization, and he's open to experimenting – they should tell him what's working and what isn't.

As a first resort, they should all close their eyes, empty their senses, and hold in their minds the image of a circle. Not some fuzzy dream-shaped idea of a circle – it should be as crisp and real as life. Can they do that? 

They can!! They can send him their circles for approval, but they're in fact all very good at detailed mental visualization.

Very convenient. Then they can start building out the structure. He'll demonstrate (osanwë is so convenient). 

Quendi are very good at visualization, and can get crisp mental images of a cantrip structure without difficulty. 

Maybe they'll be unusually quick with magic – human children usually struggle with this part. 

Now he can start explaining what all those transformations actually do. 

They have a bunch of advantages over human children! They're attentive and have good memories and talk with each other constantly and can see everything that's happening with osanwe.

They are not, actually, any faster at learning to build a cantrip, for all that.

That's – actually pretty surprising. 

In what ways are they slow? Is there anything they seem to be struggling with?

Not - visibly? They're meticulous, which makes them slower, and they don't seem to try things very much - they only make tiny changes from whatever they did the last time -

In his experience, human children't don't either – though of course, in his experience, human children are beaten for deviating from the precise structure they're being taught. 

What happens if he explicitly encourages them to experiment more? 

They will cooperatively try to follow his instructions but they don't seem to possess the slightest intuition for what he's actually asking of them.

Huh. He personally learns best by experimenting, but he's not sure if best practice here is to push more or accept that this is just what Quendi are like as a species. 

– He's going to explain this and ask them if he should push more or accept that this is what Quendi are like as a species. 

...Quendi are not really accustomed to thinking of themselves as having collective traits as a species, rather than just being what people are like. There are humans but no one has interacted with them much.

Humans trying to learn this material – he can't speak for other species on Golarion – would be much more proactive about it. The human child's natural instinct is to play with magic, to twist it and tug it, to see what it can do. It takes discipline to train that instinct out of them. Quendi seem to be missing it. 

Now, he's not certain this is a problem. He was trained to be strictly methodical, and he learned magic just fine. He's sure all of them will too. It's just that if he figures out how Quendi learn, he might be able to get them there much faster. 

Quendi learn by observation, usually, watching a master of an art without interrupting until they comprehend this themselves. They certainly wouldn't claim it's the fastest way to learn; it's the one that imposes the fewest burdens on the masters of a craft, which is its own virtue. 

That won't be a very efficient way to learn magic – even if he's using osanwë to show them what he sees, Detect Thoughts only lasts for a minute. Besides, there's only so far observation can take you if you don't understand the theory.

To that end, they can spend the rest of the lesson doing more math. (Magical theory isn't just mathematics, but there's a lot one needs to know before it starts making sense). 

Math they're notably good at, compared to any human he's ever taught math to or learned alongside! Many of them have spent a couple of centuries watching mathematical theory evolve. The mathematicians will be so delighted it turned out to describe something that really exists.

Wonderful! ....There's still a lot of it, but he can make some real headway figuring out what he can skip and what's unique to Golarion. 

They certainly won't get through it all in a day and don't even seem to have any sense that'd be desirable, but he can get a sense of where their comprehension is ahead of or behind what's required for wizardry. 

(They are obviously gossiping over telepathy a lot; whenever anyone in the class understands something, they suddenly all do.)

....Well that's real creepy. It hadn't occurred to him before to wonder how much tacit mental monitoring these people do, or how suspicious his own refusal to admit osanwë might look. He should probably get in the habit of strategically allowing it at times when he's confident he can restrain his thoughts. 

That's enough class for today. 

They are very grateful and file out in apparently high spirits. Someone brings him lunch.

He eats, somewhat listlessly. He wonders if he should ask Félix to go about pretending to be an ordinary magpie and tell him what the Quendi are like when he's not around – no, that won't work, they can read his thoughts. 

It's only about an hour past the end of lessons that beautiful instrumental music announces the King - for the benefit of mortals, osanwe having already announced it to the Quendi - and Elie is invited to the command tower again to meet him. 

Is there any very important royal etiquette he ought to know first? (He's not committed to following it or anything, but if he gives offense he'd rather it be due to a considered stand on principle). 

One dresses very elegantly to meet the King and speaks when invited to and addresses him as 'your grace' or 'your majesty' and... you know, doesn't do horrifically rude things like mocking his dead father or claiming his clothes are ugly? It's sometimes hard to guess what'll be intuitively obvious to aliens. Of course if Elie's trying to be respectful the King will be gracious about errors.

In that case he would like advice on what to wear and a more precise breakdown of the connotations of "grace" and "majesty" in Quenya. 

They are delighted to provide him with advice on what to wear, which takes mostly the form of which colors complement his best features than anything to do with politics, and equally delighted to provide him with over an hour of etymological context on forms of address in the Quendi monarchy. 

Then he will be very well-dressed and of the opinion that "your grace" (from lissë, meaning physical grace but also favor or kindness, particularly from a superior to an inferior) offends his sensibilities but "your majesty" (from alcar, really closer to "radiance" or "brilliance") is slightly better. 

Then they'll bring him in to meet the King. 

The King has striking red hair and the same delicate perfect features of his whole species, and looks genuinely delighted to see Elie. "Elie Cotonnet. Never before have I greeted a visitor from another world, you will have to forgive me my ignorance of how to do it. Welcome to Arda."

"Élie's just fine, your majesty. LIkewise, I meet very few kings, so if you excuse my ignorance I'll have to forgive yours."

"How do humans govern themselves? To us it seems that your short lifespans must be very limiting in options for governance but I suppose in our absence they don't even necessarily seem short."

"We're not all humans where I come from, and humans aren't especially long-lived. Elves live for five, six, seven hundred years, and it doesn't seem to make them much better at self-governance – but they're an insular people, so I might not know if it did. They have a monarchy,  I think. That's popular for humans, too, but not by any means universal."

"What else do people do?"

"Some places are theocracies – ruled by priests, or directly by gods. And then there are various flavors of ruling counciles, some with appointments by merit, some hereditary, some by means far too complicated for me to understand. Sometimes powerful wizards carve out their own kingdoms. I'm sure there are other things I've never heard of, as I've never left Galt until I came here. And of course Galt is a republic."

He says it like Maitimo's father spoke about language, or like Maitimo's brother speaks about Maitimo's father. "A republic?"

"Your brother didn't explain? Oh – well, it's not as if I tire of talking about it – 

A republic is a system of government wherein the people of a nation rule themselves. In Galt, we recognize the perfect right of all free reasoning beings to frame our own government, to choose who administers it, and to dismiss them if we think they've failed in their duty. At the moment we've got a national assembly, and every adult citizen may vote on a representative from their district to speak for their interests in it – the exact organization may change when the war's over. Republics are a very new thing on our planet – possibly also a very old thing – and I'd be surprised if we'd found the best way to go about it on our first try. I could go on about the many advantages of such a system even in a very provisional state, of course, but under the circumstances – " 

He doesn't look as if he particularly minds the circumstances. 

"Well, you're probably not going to persuade me I ought to try it here, because I worry that people wouldn't do exactly what I wanted if I didn't have the power to make them, but I'm not going to take offense at your explaining why it is better from every conceivable perspective other than that one. It would be a little contemptible, to not want to hear about beautiful and good things just because I won't do them."

Wonder of wonders – an honest king. 

"Are you very attached to people doing exactly what you want them to?"

"I'd say I'm fairly attached to it! I suppose the occasions where people don't do what I want and it works out well aren't necessarily obvious. But I doubt you're claiming that I'd by some mysterious alchemy get more of what I wanted if no one were trying to do it."

"I wouldn't imagine so – though it's hard to say, not knowing what you want. I could argue that your subjects would be happier, more honest, more inclined to labor for their own good and for the common good, more steadfast in their opposition to evil and tyranny whatever form it takes. We have our own tyrant god back home, and we never would have driven his servants from our borders if we were servants ourselves. Of course, my people aren't yours – and I can't fault yours for diligence.

Purely out of curiosity, I'd like to ask – what is so appealing about having people do what you say? I know it's a common vice, but not one I've ever understood particularly well."