"This is all really a lot to process. Do your stars move in predictable ways or are the conjunctions surprises?"

"Most of the constellations move in predictable ways, but the Wanderer does not, and that produces surprises; it's possible we just haven't worked out the pattern yet, but I suspect once we did it would change - that's why the Wanderer's law is Things Go Awry, it is the factor that ruins plans."

"Tragically I am not an astronomer."

"Me neither, I know enough about the constellations to cast by them but I couldn't put together a prognosticator's chart. Not that I have a telescope here anyway, Miaren's too flat and rainy for it to be particularly useful.

I feel like I am getting sidetracked and there must be more vitally important information about magic or the soul I should be desperately imparting to you. I guess I could attempt to recite the Doctrines or a few more tales of the Paragons or give you at least a working set of constellations, just in case it does help?

Oh, excommunication, if you're going to mess around with liao at some point you should know how that works - you can essentially cut someone off from their soul, they don't dream, they can't use liao, and it's unknown if something bad happens if they die under the effect but people tend to behave like it does - we haven't had a recorded past life vision of someone who is known to have died excommunicate, which obviously isn't conclusive but is pretty persuasive.

If you do it by accident, reversing it is generally a pretty similar mental motion, and it's quite a complicated state to induce - I just thought I should warn you."

"Amentans - that's what I am - dream..."

"Not conclusive, unfortunately - some Heralds dream, especially Night heralds. You're not behaving in the kind of - constrained - fashion that I'd expect from a herald, though, and I can't imagine that an Autumn herald that is up to that would go to all this trouble just to steal my bag, or listen to me ramble about ordinary things a child generally learns before their age of citizenship."

"What's the deal with Heralds?"

"So, each of the magical Realms I was talking about - Spring Summer Autumn Winter Day Night - is essentially a place in its own right, although one that creatures with souls can't survive visiting.

In those Realms there are Eternals - something between a very powerful individual magician and the embodiment of a relevant concept. Some of them are more personable and understandable than others - Ylenrith - well, Ylenwe now I guess - appears as just a very high lineage Merrow, that's the Day lineage with sea creature features - whereas Phaleron is an entire library and Yaw'na'grah is an entire forest.

Those Eternals command Heralds - creatures that speak and think, much like you and I, but are essentially just an extension of either a specific Eternal or a part of the magical Realm. Some of them are very long lived, some of them can act more or less like people, but they generally have a lot of trouble understanding things that aren't aligned with their realm of magic, and generally have some physical sign related to the realm they belong to - although that can overlap with a lineaged human.

Metallic hair colours are a sign of Autumn, but do also just occur naturally in humans or are fairly easy to dye in, to the extent that yours is in any case."

"Basically every noun you use just prompts a lot more questions. Do you think it would help if I told you about Amenta so you'd know what context I was coming from?"

"Possibly. I'd love to hear about it, I - this is just me being bad at Prosperity again, you should ignore me and tell me about Amenta."

"So we don't have... basically anything you have described. No magic rituals, no particularly impressive healing plants, no reincarnation, no unpredictable stars - I think it did take them a little while to figure out the other planets in the system, which look like stars to the naked eye but move differently - no laws of nature changing on us. Washing machines yes, and a ton of other technological things that I don't see evidence of here. We're all the one species of people, though we come in multiple castes. Our apples taste mostly like your apples, and there's the language mystery - though most Amentans don't speak Anitami - but otherwise practically nothing I see here is familiar to me. We didn't know there was anybody else out there at all, we just have fiction about it. Everybody has parents and goes to school and learns to read and do skills appropriate to a job they might do that's in their caste. Uh, our years are 1460 days long and our days are 24 hours and I'm just hoping the language mystery has 'hours' covered. People live to be about forty years old if nothing unusual befalls them in the meantime; I'm five. Medicine is done by the use of drugs, some inspired by nature but mostly artificially synthesized, and surgeries, and various therapies; travel is done with trains, or over long distances sometimes airplanes, or on the water sometimes boats. Most of our technology is fueled with electricity, which is the same sort of thing as lightning. Any of this prompt any questions or clarifications?"

"Same days, much shorter years - three hundred sixty five days and we have to wedge in an extra day every now and again to keep the seasons on track, we've got good enough astronomy to do it with individual days rather than having to make a larger correction when the solstices and equinoxes begin to obviously get out of sync.

Castes? I rather hope you don't mean like the Asaveans or the Jarmish where most of the population is essentially enslaved in one fashion or another, but I don't have another reference point - our children all get taught locally but can change nation when they come of age if they'd be better off elsewhere, different nations have kind of different specialities?

It sounds like you'd be more familiar with a League city, they aren't anywhere near as advanced as to have trains and airplanes but it's the kind of thing they write about maybe having one day. And they do experiment with lightning, although mostly they just make people's hair stand on end and frog legs jump around and so on. And tend to have more formal schooling, everyone has to learn to read and write and basic things like that for their citzenship, but hereabouts the people around them just teach them whenever they feel like it."

"Obviously I have no idea who the Asaveans or the Jarmish are! Our caste system is very bad but these days it solidly improves on outright slavery."

Allegra nods. "Well, maybe being able to promote the Virtues better will help you fix it, if you can find a way to synthesise liao.

Is your entire world very similar? I suppose better transport options probably do that, especially without egregores - uh, that's the kind of 'spirit of the nation' that we magically created for each of the nations joining the Empire, to make sure they didn't lose all their cultural distinctiveness unless they really wanted to."

"How in the fuck do they do that."

"They're basically made up of the cultural attitudes of everyone in the nation, and when you join the nation - by swearing an oath to them, it's not something you can do by accident - you feel a very subtle pressure to do culturally appropriate things? Like dress in the right colour scheme. If you're a strong willed individual you can just ignore it, but over the whole population it keeps things distinct unless the whole nation makes a specific decision to change them."

"Well, that is among the magic things we don't have, so I guess we're likely to be more uniform than you."

"Yeah, it makes sense. More like the Commonwealth - they conquer places and just completely take over culturally."

The cart track from the Steading joins up with a slightly larger cart track, which looks like it sees slightly more traffic.

"Okay, here's the Trod; we should probably head left to First Voice, as that's a sensible distance away. The other way goes more or less straight to Seren, which is our biggest city in Navarr - at this pace we wouldn't get there before nightfall."

Stepping onto the larger road - there is definitely something odd about it. It's very subtle and someone less Vigilant would probably not pick it up at all, but there is some effect here which just makes walking easier - mostly in an energetic sense rather than balance, alas, it's just less tiring than it should be to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

"- the thing that this place is doing is benign, yes?"

"Oh! Yes, it's the magic of the Trods - essentially what they're doing is pulling Spring magic out of the Vallorn - nasty twisted plant terrain that we're trying to get rid of - and repurposing it to make people more energetic. It's a very small amount of Spring magic, all it does is make it easier to walk all day, and if you rest on a Trod then you'll recover much better than usual overnight."

"The Vallorn is a source of useful energy but also nasty and to be gotten rid of?"

"Yes - we could probably power the effect with mana, the effect isn't actually the point, draining the Vallorn so that it doesn't spread and we can eventually get rid of it is the point. It ate several populated cities and animates people's bodies with their souls still stuck in there, it's the primary mission of our nation to eventually remove it. There used to be one in Seren, getting rid of it is one of the Empire's greatest achievements."

"...wow. Why is it like that?"

"The Terun - the Empire before ours - unleashed it when trying to hold back the surrounding orcs. Exactly what made it eat their cities instead is still unknown, I have a theory that it was sabotaged, but this was all over a thousand years ago and the Vallorn ate most of the evidence - what we do have is mostly pieced together from past life visions."

"Wow. Are there more - things like that - uh, background bad things that it's an ongoing project to stop having?"