"Okay. Short version, humans have souls, we reincarnate; true liao can let you have a vision of a past life but it's very rare, the liao batch has to be just right for it to work. We call the place you go while waiting to reincarnate the Labyrinth. Virtues - Prosperity, Wisdom, Courage, Vigilance, Pride, Loyalty," she pauses to count on her fingers, "Ambition, if you do them a lot then you go through the Labyrinth faster, and probably that's correlated with keeping more of your, well, you intact - or at least having more context on the situation when you come back out, and eventually break out of the cycle entirely. Nobody keeps well formed memories, but there's a certain recognition of places you previously knew, picking things up quicker.

Virtues are basically just the fundamental drives that humans happen to have, which liao can help bolster - it's possible there are a load of other qualities we just don't have access to, or that aren't as good for running a society that actually works - liao can also be used to promote Fear, Hatred, Anarchy, Vengeance, Fatalism, and Apathy, we just ban doing that as a society because, well, you can probably tell from the names that they're awkward to have around. Doctrine says they don't help you through the Labyrinth, but I am giving you the quick version that you might actually be able to use if you drop through a portal back home, so I don't want to leave anything out; we can go into more detail later if there's a later."

All the major sight lines in the Steading get checked. There is no sign of a portal.

"I should probably go through each of the Virtues, because they're not necessarily obvious from the names? We'll head down the main road next, if we can get all the way to First Voice glade without seeing anything, that makes it much less likely there is anything to see, but we can keep looking as long as you'd like - we'll have just taken out the most probable locations by then."

"The local kind of person is 'humans'?"

"Yes; you're acting a lot like a human and look like a human, so I am currently expecting it will generalise, but I haven't actually checked your soul and that bag has all the liao I actually have on hand at the moment, I'm not sure I want to risk using any up at this point.

If you're staying, I'll check you over and see if there are any obvious differences.

We also have orcs, who look a lot different and have a slightly different soul thing going on, and heralds, who don't have souls because they're essentially constructs of the realms of magic, and hylje and deva and probably some others we haven't discovered yet - trolls, though we think they're extinct - who we don't know enough of to know what happens with them. I don't expect to run into any of those in the next half hour, or in the next few months if things go as normal.

Any more specific questions, or should I start with the Virtue rundown?"

"Go ahead."

"Loyalty is pretty much what it sounds like - know what actually commands your heart, and follow that wholeheartedly. The thing people mostly mess up with that one is thinking they can decide who or what someone should be loyal to, doesn't work like that, it's about knowing what you actually value and going after that.

Prosperity is - partly it's making good use of things, not hoarding or wasting them, but mostly it's about the satisfaction of being rewarded for your work - and ensuring you actually enjoy it, rather than letting people just drive you on to the next thing - and that you spread that around. I might not be explaining it very well, I'm trying to recall what people I know who actually get it have said about it, there are lots of arguments - people often just use 'prosperous' as a shorthand for 'wealthy' but that's not it, you can be wealthy from exploiting people or just taking stuff from others and that's not Prosperous.

Wisdom is one people get wrong all the time, it's use what you've learned and if you don't know, find out. Test what you think you know, all knowledge is incomplete, 'received wisdom' is an oxymoron.

Courage is, sometimes it's the obvious thing, but mostly it's holding to what's true. If you know what's right, you know what's right and you shouldn't let other people persuade you otherwise; that includes yourself, Courage is heavily about accepting unwelcome truths and actually paying attention to their consequences and dealing with the world as it is. One of the Paragons of Courage is Kord, who brought steelworking to his nation even though everyone told him it was a bad idea and would never work.

Vigilance is also mostly what it sounds like - finding and eliminating threats to the things you want to protect, not getting complacent and then getting surprised.

Pride is - the great Paragon of Pride is Kethry, whose people were conquered, but by her determination to keep their customs alive, she actually converted the conquerors to her people's way of life, rather than them imposing theirs. It's about being yourself, and never mind what anyone else thinks of that - including yourself, accepting yourself how you come, not being ashamed, even if you did do bad things you wouldn't do again.

And Ambition is also pretty much what it says it is - if you want to do something, do it. Put everything into it. Consequences be damned, make it happen. Steal fire from the sun even though it burns your hands."

"All good things."

"Yeah. I... don't know what's going to be next most useful for you... probably runes but I'm terrible at runes, there's a rune cheat sheet in the bag with the names and a tiny bit about the meanings. Essentially they're a set of magical concepts and associated symbols, we think the Trolls discovered them; uh, every way that you do magic involves having some kind of magical tradition so you can map concepts to something you can use magically, runes are probably the most universal, a lot of the others depend on things like what your stars actually look like and deep cultural associations with theatrical roles. There's always blood magic but while I do a lot of blood magic I can't seriously recommend it, and I think that might be culturally bound too.

Anyway, runes also work on their own, weakly - if you stick a rune of... I can't even remember which one it is, but for strength on something, it actually becomes a bit stronger; some people use inverted fertility runes on the bed as contraception, although I really recommend backing that up with the right herbs rather than relying on it."

Allegra sounds very confident when in full flight explaining something, but rather frustrated and awkward in between.

"Your stars?"

"Constellations. It's actually my favourite casting method - this," she gestures to the tattoo on her right cheek, "is the Fountain, things live, it's the tattoo for my Vate oath, about responsible use of magic.

Partly it's just another symbol to concept mapping, but the position of the stars does actually influence magic - especially the Wanderer, the red star that moves erratically across the sky, things go awry. Which constellation the Wanderer is in has distinct effects, like the time it was in the Great Wyrm - things change - and a lot of rituals gave people the ability to permenantly gain lineage - uh, do you have lineages?"

"...I'm going to hazard a guess that no?"

"Right, it's the difference between me and, most of the people of Briarhome, who are Briars - that's the Spring one, where they scab over with bark, sometimes grow thorns or flowers, sometimes their veins start showing through green. There's one for each realm of magic - which I understand I haven't gone through yet, I don't even know if you'll have the same ones - Spring Summer Autumn Winter Day Night. Your world might not be as close to them as ours is, if you haven't discovered magic and don't have native lineage - which means you might not be able to create more mana crystals or do much that's useful with straight up magic, but runes and liao should still work.

If I'd been thinking I'd have tried to get you some herb cuttings, as well." She looks up into the trees beside the road. "Hala, can you go poke Dafyd and see if we have any pottable seedlings? Don't waste anything we can't spare, but if we can at least give her True Vervain to take home..."

'Hala' turns out to be a wiry teenage briar who was following them; she comes out of forest cover to nod at Allegra and start sprinting back down the road towards the Steading.

"True Vervain heals most wounds, if they're not complicated; I don't know what your medicine is like, but I expect it will help regardless, it's really very good."

"We don't have magic and nobody scabs over with bark on my planet. What do you mean complicated, what makes a wound complicated?"

"A broken bone - that needs Cerulean Mazzarine instead; poisons, infection that's set in, that would need a physick to look at it and get the right balance of other herbs. Various magical complications, anything with really significant involvement of the internal organs - essentially, what Vervain does is accelerate the normal healing process - if you would need to do something else to make something heal correctly, you still need to do that first.

You do need a little understanding of how the body absorbs herbs to apply it correctly, but if your people can build washing machines I expect they can figure it out."

"I'm not sure the two things have much to do with each other but I'm sure they'd experiment."

"Don't they? I suppose the Druj know much more about herbs than they do about clockwork. I've always been fortunate, I suppose, that magic is my main field of study - it's more amenable to experiment and things actually staying how you put them than other things, which are mostly trial and error and then they change again. At least magic tends to put up a nice big warning in the stars when it's about to change the rules.

Administration is pretty similar, people continue to be people.

Anyway. What else might be useful to you if we find a portal at the end of this path. Or have you already had too much information, I could go over some things again - there's a nice hardback notebook and some pencils in the bag if you want to take notes..."

"...change the - rules?" She does go for the notebook when advised that it's there.

"It's the inventors that complain about it the most - it turns out the reason Wisdom suggests that you test all knowledge is that a prototype that worked once might only work that once. For instance, there's a set of Ushabti that can fight as a military unit, but it's well known that you can't make Ushabti that can stand up to combat. Some people think it's just forgotten techniques, but the potion of healing that people make exactly the same way, in my lifetime used to pick people right up and make them good as new, but now will only let a trained soldier get back to the kind of endurance a normal person might be expected to have - things just change."

"My planet doesn't have that! I don't like it!"

"I can't say it's my favourite property of the world either. Generally it's not too fast, though, and it's still possible to discover things that work for a decent amount of time - there are fundamental principles behind a lot of things, which at least don't change very quickly.

But it is one of the fundamental properties of the world that things change and transform - that's the Law of the Great Wyrm constellation."

"What kinds of rules are changing - can you give me a more concrete example -"

"Hmm. It used to be possible to shatter a shield with a great weapon - something you need two hands to wield - with only a little training; exactly the same shields, made exactly the same way, now stand up to that in the absence of magic, but it's easier for a great axe to go through lesser armour and immediately drop the person wearing it. That's pretty concrete."

"...do you have more examples?"

"Some of it is hard to tell whether it's just a change in technique or a change in how the world works that let us change the technique. Like, back when I first learned magic, a combat spell that can paralyse someone would also paralyse you; nowadays it doesn't have that side effect. It had been that way for hundreds of years, but suddenly someone came up with a way to fix it. And conjunctions just change around how rituals work all the time - a fairly recent one stopped us regenerating whole body parts with Blood of the Hydra, now it only mends fractures like Mazzarine does, that was clearly not something anyone actually wanted."

"Conjunctions?"

"When the Wanderer sits in, or between, certain constellations. The Lock and Key were involved in the Blood of the Hydra change - things are hidden, things are revealed. There were also apparently strange tulpas at the Imperial Regio, although I don't go to Anvil any more, so I didn't meet one. Uh, the Imperial Regio is a place that makes it easier to do all kinds of magic, and have better contact with all the Realms of Magic; Anvil is where it is, and also for supposedly unrelated but probably very related reasons, the place where politicians gather four times a year from all over to make decisions that affect the whole Empire."