"Well, first of all, I think you can grow to rival fixity fields and archmages and gods," she begins. "Because clearly neither the gods nor myself actually understand what's possible -- we both thought we understood what the peak of achievable power looked like, and then we proved each other wrong. I have no reason to think that we've seen the limit of what people can achieve, especially with all the resources that they have now. There's a quote I heard a long time ago -- I forget where. 'To be human is to be more than human'. And I think that's true, that people have a fundamental drive to become more than they are, and surpass the limits set for them."

"And even if you don't manage it by the time the Milliways door opens again, there's no reason to think that there will stop being worlds to save. If it takes you three or ten worlds to catch up, there will still be infinitely many after that which can use your help," she continues.

She frowns a little. "I admit that I don't know what you mean by saying that things only make you stronger if they could have killed you, though. I have done several risky things in my life, but I don't think it's the danger that made me stronger -- it's the learning more, and building tools that made me more capable, robust, or efficient. And those all get easier, not harder, when you have a guarantee of safety to lean on that lets you reach further than you could alone."

...this is another 'there's only one kind of magic' moment, isn't it.

"People grow stronger by risking their lives. It's - just how the world works. A fighter who trains all his life in safety, even if he has the best teachers in the world, will only get so far. A fighter who goes out and fights in the real world will die inside of a few years, nine times out of ten, but the ones who don't die will get strong enough to take on whole companies. And eventually they'll stop growing again, because fighting a company of recruits isn't challenging anymore, and they'll need to go fight some scary monster, or someone else who got to be as powerful as they are. But as long as they keep challenging themselves, and risking defeat and death, they'll keep getting stronger - without limit."

"And It's not just fighters. Wizards cast spells from Cunning, and they don't become much smarter by killing people the way fighters become stronger, but they still have to fight and risk their lives to ever get above second or third circle. It's why Cheliax has - had so many wizards at the Worldwound, they came here to fight demons so they could cast stronger spells. And a lot of them died in the process, or it wouldn't have worked."

"Even people like - skalds, who go singing into battle, they don't just become stronger and better at fighting, they become better singers, because they were using their songs to help them win. I met a monk once who came to the Worldwound to become better at meditation by hitting people."

"Clerics are actually a bit of an exception, because the gods can give more or fewer spells to the people they want to accomplish their goals. But we - they - still fight a lot. Even clerics of Sarenrae who wouldn't hurt a fly go out and risk their lives by healing people as the fighting rages. Not because that does more Good than healing them off the battlefield, because that way they'll be able to heal more people tomorrow."

"Except now no-one's going to be risking their lives much. Maybe the most powerful people will keep finding reasons to do so, but there won't be - normal people, born and raised in some farming village, going off and fighting the forests or bandits or joining a mercenary band, and becoming powerful adventurers and heroes who can change the fate of whole countries for the better. There will be just - peace. And it's worth it, for peace, and probably people will find other ways to grow and to matter."

"But not my way. Not anymore."

"... huh. Huh."

She sits with that for a moment.

"Honestly, that makes a lot of things about Golarion make more sense," she finally replies. "And explains why there were not very many powerful wizards compared to the number of people trying to become powerful wizards."

She stares into space for a moment, before shaking her head and refocusing.

"So I have two immediate thoughts. For one, we can try to figure out why that happens, and see if there's a way to adapt it, or edit the criteria or something like that. Secondly, if it turns out that would be impossible for some reason, people can still opt into danger, if they feel like the tradeoff would be worth it. Unless knowing that they could be saved negates it, or something like that."

She narrows her eyes at him, consideringly.

"We should go fight a dragon. For science."

That's really attractive! And a really attractive offer! But.

"It won't work if we know we're safe. Only if there's real danger, like getting everyone to promise not to raise us in our case, and not wanting to die. ...you're not mortal, so you can't even do that. And people absolutely opt into danger, that's what being an adventurer is, but the danger is real and most of them die."

"Also, I don't know any dragons other than Terendelev and I don't want to fight her anymore and anyway I don't know how to do it if she keeps flying. Have you met any dragons you'd want to fight lately?"

"There are a bunch of people who hang out on Venus living as dragons," she offers. "I have no idea what Creation's self-improvement-through-murder magic would think of fighting them, but they're usually down for a fight. I was sort of hoping it would still count if you hadn't fully internalized that you're safe from dragons yet," she explains.

"If it did work, I could see it in action and it would give us a clue to figure out how to take advantage of it going forward. But if you're pretty sure it wouldn't count, then that's a dead end."

She drums her fingers on her knee.

"There are other experiments we could do. Like, did you know there's a spell that can make you believe something with no justification? Super creepy! But we could do experiments with that to see if it worked. That's kind of getting away from the real point, though."

"I get why you'd be sad about losing the opportunity to keep growing stronger in the way that has served you so far, but ... what's more important to you? Getting stronger, or getting stronger in that specific way?"

"You can... use magic to make people believe they're in danger, to let them level without actually being in danger? That sounds too good to be true. I mean, if it worked, then whichever mage had it would be the most powerful in the world! And I guess I don't know that none of the greatest archmages did it that way, but - I've never heard of such a thing working. It looks like many secrets are going to come out now, so maybe by this time tomorrow everyone will be practicing that way!"

"If it doesn't work out, and I had to guess at why, I'd say - probably you also need to succeed at doing something actually hard, and not just believe it's hard. To risk failure, and not be secretly guaranteed success. Maybe the failure doesn't have to be specifically death, it's just a very final kind of failing at everything. But if all it took was fooling yourself, then I expect someone would have managed it by now, spell or no spell. I heard a foreign saying once: we can always make a better fool."

"And it's not that I don't want to find a new way. I like this way because it always works. If I couldn't find any safe or clever ways around something, I always had hope that eventually I'd overcome it by brute force and taking risks. 'Who dares, wins' - at least sometimes. Even if I couldn't help someone now when it mattered, I always knew I could at least grow strong enough to help others like them some day, and I knew what to do to get there."

"Maybe it's that - any new way I find is going to be something everyone can do now. Like the spell you mentioned, either it works for everyone or not at all. And I'm not sure how I feel about - only doing as much as other people, and not having any way of being better than that, by doing something I'm actually better at or by choosing to take risks I wouldn't ask of others."

"Oh! I see," she responds. "That makes perfect sense, that you would want to have something you are good at that would let you stand out from the crowd."

She bites her lip thoughtfully.

"So my initial instinct is that you might be surprised, by how many people don't try. By which I mean ... There are a lot of people who are 'just' going to focus on living a content life, or who will focus on goals different from your goals -- getting better at music, discovering old secrets, becoming a socialite. And so, even when people all have so many resources to work with, they will still grow in different directions, leaving you a chance to distinguish yourself by being the person most dedicated to your goals. But honestly, does change that a bit. Magic can do things like bestow skills and mental attributes which we ... have no idea how to do without magic. So maybe that's not true, anymore, that people naturally differentiate themselves by what skills they intend to work on."

She sighs.

"I'm sorry. I wish I had an answer ready for you. I like being able to give people the things they want. But you're right; I don't know what you would be best at, what you can do better than everyone else. I know how I plan to keep growing -- studying magic and the mind, to see if I can figure out a way to join back up with my forks and be all of us at once -- but that's the thing which has always worked for me, not the thing which has worked for you."

"What do you think you would need to discover, or to have resolved, or to have be true, for you to feel as though you had a predictable path to power on which you could distinguish yourself again?" she asks.

Gord gives this some thought.

He doesn't want to feel as though he had a predictable path to power. He wants to really have one.

Or does he? It was, in some sense, only a conceit that he could grow in strength as a fighter without limit. He could grow strong enough to one day solve the problems in front of him, because they happened to be human-sized problems, and because he limited himself to some sense of the achievable; he didn't think about tackling bigger problems because he hadn't solved these ones yet.

He could have grown strong enough to threaten whole companies of men, but he couldn't have challenged Khorramzadeh as a fighter. Everyone fought with allies, yes, but the only people alive or recently dead who were actually strong enough to turn the tables against even a demon lord were all mages, or at least paladins. Being a cleric was obviously the thing to bet on, but equally obviously a cleric's power is only borrowed, and that would have been true even if he had really been Gorum's. Neither Norgorber nor Gorum would keep a Neutral Good cleric, and while he had no expectation of being that, he was hardly going to refrain if his path took him there.

Kurgess supposedly became a demigod just by being really, really good at athletics. But there are many conflicting stories, and Gord hadn't been living his life in hope of being the next Kurgess.

He could discover a way to become stronger. But he doesn't wish to find a way that would only work for him and not his allies.

He could - well, it could be true that he'd never need to fight again, and so didn't have to worry about it. He doesn't think the world is like that. It could be, if they never find any other worlds, but he's not going to bet on it.

He could conclude that there is no way he'll ever matter again, thoroughly enough to make him quit searching, and make peace with that. To genuinely believe there's nothing he can do anymore.

When he thinks about that, he feels - screaming horror, at the thought of giving up. A void, at the thought of never being able to make up for everything he regrets having done.

Reality doesn't owe it to him to be comfortable, or comforting. He doesn't want to be deluded about mattering. But - it doesn't feel like a conclusion he can contemplate accepting. Not now, maybe not ever.

What else is there? To keep trying, even though he sees no way for it to work, to never give up the struggle even if everyone leaves him in the dust, even if swords become meaningless and everyone fights with fields and Wishes and things he doesn't even have words for? To keep struggling even without faith?

He thinks he can do it. It's the kind of thing he could contemplate doing, before he met Cherry. 

But he wants to do better than that.

"I had a - story," he concludes. "Everyone understands the world through stories. Mine was that I would become strong enough or die trying. The details didn't matter, because if I had no plan yet, being stronger would help with that. And I knew the future would always surprise me. So I took life one step at a time, and didn't think beyond the months ahead, the mission and the people in front of me."

"That story isn't true anymore. Maybe it never was, on a grand scale involving gods and worlds, only in my local backyard. Maybe I can find another small place where I'm big enough to help, but everyone can do that now, and many more people will. Which is good, of course, and I never really thought that I was the only one trying to fix the world. Even if it felt like it at times."

"If I thought those in power - that's you, now, and the gods, and everyone else who is going to find a way to greater power - if I thought everything would be fine now, everyone's going to be helped, and I could leave it all to you, I wouldn't worry about me not being strong enough."

"I'm not used to believing in that. Even when I know it, rationally, I don't feel like I don't need to be strong enough to challenge the gods on behalf of - someone I haven't even met yet. I still feel that the next time anything goes wrong, what I'll need to fix it won't be logic or Cunning or Splendor but in the ultimate resort always brute force, because people want different things and getting what I want means fighting someone else. I fight with words when I can, but having only words feels - terrifying."

"And, obviously, I'm wrong."

"I have allies now. Some of the strongest people around want most of the same things I do. I shouldn't be trying to play the lone rebel anymore, in this story. I should be relying on you - you personally, Azalea, and Desna and Cayden and Sarenrae and Milani and everyone else. If I still had a way to power, I'd share it with you, and if I ever have to seriously fight you I don't think I could win. I'm not looking for a way to become stronger than you are, I'd be a fool to build my life around that."

"So I think instead I should - go and find problems, and try to fix them, and ask you for help when I can't do it myself. The problems don't deserve to wait until I've grown stronger. I'll find out what I'm better at than anyone else who's trying, or someone else will figure it out and ask me to help. If I can't find anything I can't solve, or that you can't solve when I ask you to, that's one answer."

"And if I do find something you can't or won't help me with, I'll figure out where to go from there. I can't really plan it out in advance. And it will bother me that I have nothing to fall back on except other people. But - I hope it won't bother me too much, if when I keep finding problems you do help."

"It's not really an answer. Not the kind I thought I had before. But the universe doesn't owe me a way to grow stronger and to win. A predictable path to power was probably just a silly idea to begin with."

"Most people never had a chance, even in my old world. Most farmers don't have the money or the raw skill or the chance to leave with a mercenary band, get training, survive a war and then go on to do whatever they want to. I wasn't that much better than everyone else, I was also lucky."

"We're better now. We fought and we won. We're not weaker than we used to be. We have stronger allies, and the people we wanted to help are stronger too. It would be silly of me to be sad that the world is better now. I'll probably just have to - try it, and figure it out as I go."

He looks at Azalea consideringly. "But if you have any better ideas, I'm all ears! Like the one about fighting a dragon. It sounds like a great way to relax and celebrate after a war! We should probably do some of that, before throwing ourselves at the hardest and most painful problems that are left."

She grins at him. "I have been trying to get people to party. If fighting a dragon is appropriate relaxation, then who am I to argue?"

She pauses for a moment. "That said, I have two thoughts before we go find one. Firstly, I think that your plan to go find problems and solve them sounds great. Thank you so much. Like, yes, my self-tree is powerful. But everyone else outnumbers us by millions to one at least, once you count all the outsiders. So we may be able to solve problems with brute force, but we just don't have enough attention to notice everything that's inevitably going to go wrong and attend to it. Having other people helping with that is really nice, and I feel confident we can trust you to do so well. After the dragon, I can hook you into our queue of problems someone has raised which we haven't gotten to deal with yet, if you'd like."

"And secondly -- I think you should still plan on surpassing me in power. I'm not going to make it easy on you, because I intend to keep getting better. But ... it would be sad, if the difficulty of the task ended up being an excuse to stop growing. Ten years ago? I was an ordinary woman with no particular power. I have no idea what is going to be possible in another ten."

She hops up and switches into light ceramic-composite plate armor.

"What kind of dragon are you in the mood for? My world has immersive stories that would let us fight a recreation of a dragon of legend, but we might be able to get an actual dragon. I'm sure at least one of them wants to have a fight right now."

Gord thinks planning to surpass Cherry is rather doubtful, as plans go. It has the right spirit, though.

Not a plan or a goal, then. An aspiration.

"I won't stop trying," he agrees. "Not trying to surpass you because I need to be stronger than you are, because we might be opposed one day and I have to live my life preparing for that moment. But because we'll always keep striving. And" - he grins - "because it would be really fun to beat you to saving a world for once!"

"Recreation of a dragon of legend, ha - we can literally recreate the dragons of legend by resurrecting them now, we don't need stories! Or we could go meet them in their afterlives." He considers. "This is the point where if I really were a cleric of Gorum, I'd cast a Miracle to let us fight a suitable dragon. But we can still go to his domain in Elysium and look for a fight. Or -"

He turns around. Does Cayden's trick of always-having-been-there work the other way, if Gord expects him to be right there at the Milliways bar?

It does! It really does!! Good on you for figuring that out.

Cayden grins his very best grin. "I have saved the very best dragon for you," he says dramatically, and snaps his fingers.

A pair of heavy wooden doors fades into existence along one wall. They are decorated with intricate wooden carvings, or perhaps they are made of living wood, their leaves stirring in an imaginary breeze. Little lizards with brilliantly-colored frills dart along the boughs, freezing to look at Azalea and breathe tiny warning plumes of fire when she gets too close.

Aww! The lizards are cute.

She thinks for a moment about how she should prepare for the fight. Dragons suggest fire resistance, but ... where would it end? She's not going to fight it with wishes.

She glances over at Gord to see what he's got. His only relevant enchanted item is a sword, so she gives herself a crossbow with a similar enchantment and a quiver full of mundane bolts. She is going to give herself a little bit of targeting assist, though, because Gord is definitely more skilled with his sword than she is with her bow.

The rest of her equipment is entirely mundane, but her armor has pretty good comfort and heat resistance. She puts a compact first-aid kit on one hip and a water bottle on the other, and then reaches into her settings to turn off most of her fixity-based defenses. She leaves her pain response configurable, though. There's no need to be stupid about it.

Then she walks up to the doors, and glances at Gord to be sure he's ready, before pulling them open.

Gorum's divine domain lies in Elysium, in an endless plain ravaged by endless war.

Castles stand proud or lie in smoking ruins. Cavalry charges are met by bears and wizards and lone heroes. Champions fight duels, and fall, and rise to fight again. Alliance are made and broken, fortunes made and ruined, in the space of an hour. None die who do not wish it; but without the risk of death there is no true growth.

And over it all great shapes wheel, their very shadows striking terror into the hearts of the unwary. Great wyrms, copper and brass, blue-white and red-black and more, in flights unseen on Golarion since before Earthfall, their might unmatched by any upstart mortal race. They are not arrogant, for under Gorum's rule any arrogance soon punishes itself, and yet they ride the currents of air triumphantly. They are the scions of the first and greatest mortal race, the heirs of aeons, the match of any but the gods; and they will face any challenger and smite them back down into the dust.

...honestly, these dragons might be a little too big to take on with a +1 sword and crossbow and a first aid kit.

Cayden's realm is close to Gorum's. It is called the Fields of Battle, and it is similar in some ways.

People fight each other, for petty reasons or for no reason at all. They try their strength and wits against each other. The smallest bird and the greatest mage can find their match there, often in each other. Trees are burned by fireballs and wyrms and rise anew the next round, ready to strike down their enemies.

But they do it all with a smile, and a clap on the back at the end. They rest and drink and play and kiss, around and throughout the fighting. They stop bouts to accuse each other of cheating, or to ask in admiration how something was done, or just for a drink. They fight and drink and dance and dance-fight and drunk-fight, and they have elaborate competitions of rhyming insults that deal real damage if the audience likes them. They have every sport that gets your heart pumping with excitement, crossed with archery and with ray-of-frost tag and with each other, unbothered by little things like gravity and causality and sense. 

Nobody in Cayden's domain ever chooses to risk true death in battle. What would be the fun in that?

Gorum and Cayden's realms aren't really separate. Elysium doesn't do silly things like boundaries and rules, the people wouldn't stand for it. The two realms intermingle and shade into each other, and people come and go as they please. Everyone gravitates towards what they enjoy, and tries the other thing sometimes, to see what all the excitement's about.

Being in a god's domain, in Elysium, doesn't really mean being in Their power, except in the most boring and literal of senses. It means accepting the god's power and domains because they speak to you for the moment, and so partaking of what They make of their surroundings. But above all, it means being with like-minded people. 

The kind of fight Gord and Azalea want right now, and the like-minded dragon who'll give it to them, lie much more in Cayden's realm than in Gorum's.

The doors open on a sparsely wooded plain.

There are brilliant colors everywhere, plants, flowers, streams, the very grass and sky seem more vibrant and truer to life than anything on the Material. Like spending your life on a quest for a mythical Sky and seeing it for the first time, like the very first illusion you ever cast to discover there are colors not found in nature, like sight granted to the halfway-blind, Elysium is brighter, more vivid, more right than your life so far. It is the world seen not just the way it is but the way you always wanted it to be, and the way for it to be that's best for you even if you didn't know to want it yet.

A four-foot-long purple dragon with dragonfly wings and a huge grin jumps out excitedly from behind a tree.

"Hi! I'm Aivu! I've heard all about you! I'm so excited you came to play with me! I mean fight me. Come fight me, brave adventurers!" She strikes a dramatic pose.

Gord has never met a havoc dragon, but some cues are just obvious. "Are you a great wyrm shapeshifted to a little dragon, because we must prove ourselves worthy of your true form?" he guesses.

"That would be fun! Yesterday I thought it'd take me forever to grow up! But then you gave us the fixity, so I don't have to anymore! Now, behold my awesomeness!"

She stretches, and grows, and keeps growing, inflating and glittering like an iridescent soap bubble in the sun until she towers over them, a hundred feet long and twice that in wingspan. "I am a little dragon, shapeshifted to a great wyrm! Winter transformed to summer, fruit ripened out of season!"

"Come challenge me, great heroes, and see if you can land a blow!" she cries in a great voice, and the sound of it is the inspiration of a trumpet calling to arms, the joy of victory in the evening and the courage needed to seek it the morning before. It can make everyone who hears it brave and strong and free, better at love and at war and at every skill there is through sheer bravery, and you can stop it with your will or with the fixity field but why would you deny the clarion call of battle and adventure?

Heroism has been white-listed by her self-tree as 'probably harmless and temporary, pending further investigation', so her fixity crystal doesn't pick the spell apart as it settles across her mind. Instead, it just locks her out of sensitive settings and drops an 'intoxicated' flag on her public profile until she sobers up.

"Have at thee, wyrm!" she cries, pulling out her crossbow and moving to the side so that Gord has clear space to try and close.

"For freedoooom!"

Gord can't realistically hit a great wyrm, but maybe if he tries hard enough something will come out of it?

"Go go go go go!" Quickened wind wall!

A sudden updraft flicks away any crossbow bolts, but Gord isn't impeded until -

Grease!

Azalea quickly scans the terrain to see if there's a place where she can get a better vantage on Aivu -- maybe one where the dragon won't be able to interpose a wind wall, or where she could get above and jump down -- while she reloads.