...It's a little complicated how far he trusts Karal, Leareth thinks, but - not that much? Less complicated than he has realized before he had a reason to think about it so explicitly. 

It feels related to what Karal just thought, that -

It's important for this to be visible, because it would be wronging people, to let them attack or insult or act against you without knowing the possible consequences.  (His home is a violent culture, but they try to be honest about it.)

- (which, incidentally, feels oddly familiar to Leareth as a frame, he's not sure he thinks it's the ideal kind of culture but it's - one he knows how to live in) - anyway, it feels like it helped him pin down something about Karal he had already formed intuitions about. It does matter that Karal hasn't decided - can't decide, yet, until he has full information - whether he's on board with Leareth's life and Leareth's goals, and until then Leareth can't reasonably consider him an ally. But he does, actually, trust Karal's intention not to try to hurt him, and would trust his oath somewhat further than that, if he's comfortable giving it. He trusts that if Karal were to change his mind - or, maybe it's more fair to say, make up his mind in the first place and land on the side of "opposed to Leareth's work" - that this wouldn't come in the form of a surprise betrayal. 

(- a pang of grief-bitterness-frustration-loneliness, surprisingly intense - Leareth nudges it aside, not now -) 

...anyway, even if Karal could expect to hide his thoughts from Leareth, Leareth - trusts that he wouldn't, that Karal would make sure it was clearly stated and conveyed between them that he was withdrawing his agreement to cooperate. And also Leareth can read his thoughts and does expect he could intercept any attempt at sabotage - which probably matters, in terms of how secure Leareth feels in making decisions based on even a very confident character assessment of Karal, rather than defaulting to the highest level of caution because that's the safest policy to be following. Given that, it seems solidly neutral-to-better for him to have Karal armed (even if there were a realistic route for Karal to commit sneaky sabotage with a sword, which there isn't really when they're about to Gate to a library and then sit there and read. Nayoki - and most of the other people here - are going to be wearing shield-talismans and are impractical to injure with edged weapons.) 

(Leareth doesn't really like the uncertainty, looks forward to it being resolved, and definitely hopes it resolves in the direction where they can be allies. He's deliberately not focusing on that, though, it seems - unfair to Karal, to let his own feelings about it leak too much and risk putting emotional pressure on Karal to come to a particular conclusion because doing otherwise would make Leareth sad.) 

Leareth is entirely right in what he thinks Karal would and wouldn't do.  And Karal could, of course, simply be a man who Leareth can trust with a sword because there's little harm to be done with it, but he would much rather be more than that, to the extent he can.  And... it's good, to know his oath will mean something here.

I swear - it would usually be in the Sunlord's name, but he doesn't mean it any less without it - that I will not betray you, or act against you, or hide my intentions from you, with no condition except that you let me die if I ask. 

It settles on his thoughts - Nayoki would be able to see it more clearly than Leareth, perhaps - not quite like a compulsion, but almost halfway to one.  He swore he wouldn't, so he will not - it's outside of the range of thinkable actions now, on the instinctive level where most of his decisions are, and it doesn't look like anything could change that.  (He doesn't have the habit of wording his intentions very precisely, and he likely failed somewhere, but the underlying commitment is to being trustworthy rather than to the specific words - if there are loopholes in what he said, he doesn't intend them and will not use them).

Some things would be harder to promise, wouldn't settle so easily down to the subconscious parts of his mind, but this one isn't hard at all. 

He sends a tentative smile, and a feeling of being more settled in their mutual trust.  He's glad they had the conversation that led here.

And for the other decision, he sees around the edges of Leareth's thoughts that they're... thinking about it somewhat differently, maybe?  He's not sure.  It's not impossible he'll decide to die rather than cooperate at all, but he knows Leareth well enough that it seems very unlikely - the main question, in his mind, is whether he'll stay like he is now, an honor-bound prisoner inclined to help but sworn only not to interfere, or whether he'll decide he wants to bind himself to more than that.  They've been in the first option so far, and that has... been all right, he thinks, and he hopes Leareth doesn't think staying like this is something to worry about.

Leareth is also glad they had that conversation! It was clarifying, and incidentally means that less of his thoughts are being vaguely sad, which he knows Karal doesn't mind but it didn't feel productive to him. It's...probably going to keep being the case for a while that it feels like they're belatedly having important conversations that should have happened earlier, but realistically couldn't have because there just aren't that many candlemarks in a day and there are a huge number of important conversations to have. 

(Leareth hasn't been actively worried about Karal's - wellbeing or comfort feels incomplete, but something including that - in their current equilibrium, and he's glad to have it more explicit that Karal thinks this is all right. For his own part, Leareth isn't sure it would feel entirely stable as a long-term destination, but - hmm, it's hard enough to unpack why, even to himself, that probably they should just go read some records. Leareth is vaguely hoping he can consult notes on the lifetimes where he shared his body, to see more of how that ends up looking - or at least one way it could end up looking - weeks or months down the line.) 

They can go meet Nayoki for the Gate. 

If Nayoki notices a difference in Karal's mind after giving his oath, she doesn't say anything about it, but she does smile at him with particular warmth. (She's been trying to figure out how to convey in body language that she's addressing words or expressions to Karal versus Leareth, though she isn't sure how clear it will be.) 

She's not as fast and smooth at Gates as Leareth, but she's clearly very very good. 

And the library on the other end of the Gate is - not just incredibly magical everywhere, or full of a spectacular number of well-organized books, it's also nice, in a way that nothing else Karal has seen so far really is. There are permanent mage-lights that are also made in attractive crystal designs, and the bookcases are polished hardwood with some amount of decorative carving, and there are thick rugs and upholstered chairs and finely-made desks and tables for reading.

Leareth's last train of thought amuses Karal - I can't remember the last time someone's been this worried about my comfort! - but yes, they should go read some records.

(He does notice Nayoki smiling at him, although he's not sure how much it's the body language and how much it's just that he thinks she wouldn't look at Leareth with that particular expression.)

That is a lovely library.  He doesn't care for himself, but he's glad Leareth and his people get to have things like this, at least sometimes. 

The magic, too, is lovely - they can settle at a convenient desk, and he'll happily watch the spells and try to make guesses about what they're doing while he waits for what happens next.  (Reading, presumably.  He wonders if it's all going to be in code.)

Nayoki seems to have thoughts on what they should read first; she heads immediately for one of the shelves, this particular one behind a magically-locked door that Nayoki is apparently keyed to, since she opens it without Leareth's help. “I am thinking you start with the high-level summary of your work as Altarrin - that was your last lifetime in the Eastern Empire, there are very good records of it and the summary includes earlier context - and then the notes from early in your next life on why you decided not to return. And then I think from there you can jump to the later notes on - what you decided you needed to do instead." 

She sifts through a shelf, pulls out and hands them a fairly thin leatherbound volume, and then nudges them toward a chair. "I will go make tea." 

Leareth spends a moment trying and utterly failing to remember anything from the name "Altarrin" and the knowledge that it was the last lifetime he spent in the Eastern Empire. He...remembers facts about the Empire, apparently, and expects he could retrieve a lot more of them if prompted with the right questions, but apparently all direct recollections of his personal life - lives - there are gone. 

(Facts that come easily to mind: it's east of Hardorn. He's not sure how far east, the borders have expanded - and occasionally, but more rarely, contracted again - over the nearly 1700 years of its existence. Leareth founded it, not in the sense that he was the only person involved, nowhere near that, but in the sense that he's pretty sure it wouldn't exist without the impetus he provided. It's wealthy and full of magic, one of the few places in the world that equals and in some ways exceeds the state-of-the-art from before the Cataclysm, and...nonetheless not a nice place, in many ways. It bans all worship of the gods. Anyone powerful or important or Gifted - or who happens to live or work near such people - is under compulsions to serve the Emperor. It's impressively stable given the inevitable political infighting, and - hardly anybody there is free.) 

Without forcing it, Leareth makes a gentle bid to take over the body and start reading. 

(The book isn't in cipher, but it is in the Imperial language, as it was spoken and written 1100 years ago - it must have never seemed worth translating his older notes. Karal presumably won't be able to read it. Leareth does intend to read more slowly than he otherwise might and take care to make his thoughts fully open to Karal, since the whole point of this is to give Karal background as much as for Leareth himself to jog his memory.) 

Karal is aware that the Eastern Empire... exists... and is somewhere in the east, although now that he thinks about it it seems an odd name for a place.  It's not right east of Hardorn, he knows that much, but probably past one of the countries in that direction.

Under compulsion to-- Karal barely knows what a compulsion is, but the name and mental context is clear enough, and he hates the thought of it.  It sounds like an awful place, at least for anyone who's trying to do anything.  But it's clear that Leareth meant to make something good there, and they should read about it so Karal can see how. 

He gives up the body to Leareth, and tries to distract himself from the still slightly dizzying experience of reading text he cannot in fact read.  (He considers whether he should be trying learn some of these languages, but there's probably dozens of them...)  But he's looking forward to finding out what it was like to live in such a completely different place, and what Leareth was like when he was... someone else, in a sense... and so long ago.

Some very quick initial background: Altarrin was the third son of the Duke of Kavar, and like most nobleborn children in the Empire at that time, was sent to court to be educated (and to be a hostage to ensure his family's good behavior). He wasn't Leareth, yet, when he left his parents' home at nine or ten and was placed under the standard court compulsions. By the time he saw them again, he was. He was generally recognized by his teachers as very intelligent as well as hardworking, and he was also a mage, Adept-strength; this was far less of a lucky strike of fate in the Empire, where approximately all noble families had the Gift in their blood. He graduated from the Hall of Learning, passed the civil service examination with the highest possible marks, and embarked on a long and fruitful career, first as a military officer - nearly a requirement for the positions of power he would need to nudge the Empire's policies in his preferred direction, but he was also genuinely very good at it - and later at court. He attained the title of Archmage-General before he was fifty - young by the standards of the Empire, where life-extending magic was universal among the powerful - and served the Empire for a number of decades after that. 

(From Leareth's perspective, looking back and still not actually remembering any of this firsthand, it's - not clear to him to what extent Altarrin at any point had a choice? By the time Leareth - not-yet-Leareth - woke up in a teenager's body, he would already have been under the standard court compulsions. It would have been very difficult to leave. It - might not have been fully possible to think about leaving.) 

What a place, to take people and just... use them like this, even in its highest positions, give them all this power but somehow still no meaningful choice.  (He can see why, when he thinks of it like that, because he knows what other things people will do with power, but... it's still wrong, to take away all their choices in order to remove the wrong ones, and besides it's not clear it even worked for that.)  The parents were under the same compulsions and he assumes couldn't think about not sending their children to court either.  How far back?  Who started this?  Probably Leareth doesn't know and neither does this book they're reading, it's just hard not to wonder.

And... it seems dangerous, for Leareth to be trapped in a place like that.  He worries about whether sharing with Karal will change him too much - would living his whole life under this sort of all-encompassing compulsion not be worse?  It doesn't seem to have been a disaster, and in any case Leareth didn't have a choice about it (Karal doesn't know the details of how his reincarnation works, but he thinks if choice was involved he would have noticed), but it's still a worrying thing to have happened. 

Going by the existence of these notes, Altarrin did leave something for his next self instead of sacrificing all his supplies and knowledge to the empire, but how did he manage even that?  Did he just assume, being himself unable to think of doing anything else, that his next incarnation would come back to serve the empire the same way?  ...How many times did Leareth come back to the empire when he wasn't born didn't take over a body already trapped there?  He did found it, and it makes sense for him to have wanted to come back to his project, but...  Karal doesn't like any of this.

Well, they're reading these notes, so they can see something of the results.  What was Altarrin trying to accomplish, with the Empire's policy decisions or anything else in his life?  Did it work?  Seen from the outside, does it seem like something Leareth would be doing?

There are snippets of context on the Empire's history covered in the notes, though it's not really meant as a history primer, and it's also prompting Leareth's memory. The system of compulsions doesn't date back to the founding of the Empire under the First Emperor; originally, compulsions were only used as an alternative to execution for serious crimes. The expansion to "everyone important" happened later, after the First Emperor and his top advisors, including Arvad - who was one of Leareth's lives - were messily murdered, as part of a plot by followers of Atet, one of the gods worshipped in the region near the tiny initial core of the Empire, and the Empire collapsed into civil war until the Second Emperor - the next of Leareth's incarnations - took power. And started considering options to make it at least harder for assassination plots to reach the core government of the Empire. ...And then, of course, the system became a self-reinforcing one, and in the periods between when he was alive and in a position of significant power, it had a definite tendency to start degrading into worse, more pointlessly exploitative versions of what Leareth had initially built.  

Which...does feel predictable now, but Leareth genuinely isn't sure how predictable it was without the benefit of hindsight, or the deeper understanding of governments and politics that he's built gradually over centuries? And - certainly at the start, less than two hundred years after the Cataclysm, he must have been mostly caught up in desperation. People were starving, Changecreatures were at large even well outside the Pelagirs per se, bandits were roaming unchecked, and the survival of civilization must have felt so, so tenuous. 

He must have chosen to come back a number of times when not strictly bound to it; his immediate previous incarnation, for example, was an immigrant born outside the Empire entirely, and it's not in these particular notes but it seems plausible on other occasions he came back in the body of a common-born youngster whose mage-gift had yet to be identified. It's still a minority of the Empire's population under compulsions, and a much smaller minority of twelve to fourteen year olds; it's just that to do anything interesting - and, for a long time, he thinks the Empire was the best place on the continent for that - you need to be near the centers of power, and being trusted with power is something the Empire runs entirely on mind control. 

Altarrin does not seem to have been impaired in keeping his records updated, or even in sometimes Gating off to do personal errands outside the Empire entirely. He was bound by compulsions to obey direct orders from the Emperor, but it seems like most of the day-to-day work, once he was in a senior position, involved operating with quite a lot of autonomy; he couldn't do anything to sabotage the Empire, but he doubts he wanted to, and the compulsions allowed him to have personal goals that weren't about obeying orders. Also, it was one of the eras when "serve the Empire" was ranked above "serve the Emperor", and Leareth suspects that - given how he conceptualized the Empire as his own creation, and as a vision he had yet to achieve fully - he could eke quite a lot of flexibility out of that, and justify maintaining his records and resource base as obviously in the interests of the true spirit of the Empire. 

- anyway, in broad strokes, Altarrin spent his career accumulating political favors and then using them to root out corruption and nudge the Empire's laws and institutions toward the more functional and human-welfare-improving state that he wanted. And, of course, holding off the inevitable external and internal threats to the Empire, many of which he diagnosed as directly god-related plots. (The northwestern-most province of the Empire was nudging up against Iftel, by then, and despite its relatively low population - it was cold and arid with poor farmland and a short growing season, and had been annexed mainly for mining - Isk was the ultimate source of a truly excessive amount of sabotage. The Empire's southern border also expanded on Altarrin's watch, annexing the country formerly known as Oris and, thus, involuntarily adding a population base who - understandably - had some strong resentment against the Empire.) 

Mostly it seems like grinding, unrewarding work, and even the tersely summarized notes, written near the end of Altarrin's life, are permeated with a feeling of weariness. At least according to Leareth's sense of it now, Altarrin seems to have focused his attention on broadly reasonable things – maybe with the exception of his military work on expanding the Empire, which Leareth has at best very mixed feelings about, particularly Altarrin successfully crushing a particular thorny rebellion in newly-annexed Oris that happened at the same time as a couple of very poorly timed rebellions by Imperial generals in long-established provinces. But a personal history of glorious military victories was clearly one of the currencies of influence that Altarrin used to root out the inevitable abuses of power that had crept up since the last time he had enough sway to do anything about them.

Outside of his official duties, Altarrin invested quite a lot of time and attention in finding and mentoring particularly promising young people – especially people who genuinely cared about and believed in the ideals of the Empire, but who lacked the political savviness to survive in the Imperial court. There are dozens of names mentioned, often with real fondness leaking through.

(Leareth doesn't remember any of them)

Altarrin's largest success, at least according to his own summary, was in cultivating, successfully appointing, and mentoring his chosen candidate for Emperor, Bastran IV. Someone who, against the odds, genuinely and deeply cared about doing right by the people of the Empire. ...And was still constrained, by the Empire's laws and culture and the other power bases he needed to placate, by the weight and momentum of six hundred years of history, but he does, in fact, seem to have worked with selfless dedication toward the welfare of his citizens for his entire life. 

(Bastran, too, would have been under compulsions since childhood. As Emperor, he was under only a single and quite flexible compulsion, to loyally serve the good of the Empire.) 

(There's a short addendum to the notes, presumably added later, because it states that Altarrin died at the hand of rebels on the western border - followers of Anathei, this time, though internal politics of the Empire played a part in why he was there - several decades after the pacification of the rebellion in Oris. There was nothing particularly unique or brilliant about the plot, Altarrin had survived dozens if not hundreds of attempts on his life, but he had rolled the dice over and over for his entire life, and eventually he wasn't careful enough. 

A handful of years later, Bastran IV was found dead by poison in his own quarters. The assassin, if there was one, was never identified. The addendum to the notes states, without any further explanation, that Altarrin wouldn't be shocked if his death had been a suicide, though he would have expected the compulsion of service to at least make suicide difficult to consider.) 

Ah.  God, yes, of course you would build a system that trapped and used up its best people if that was the only way you saw for anyone and anything to survive.  But the later expansion seems just clearly wrong - it doesn't sound like the people of Oris or Isk were at such great risk of starvation or bandits or Changecreatures that it made sense to fight them about it.  (The war in Oris reminds him of his own war, in the horrible pointlessness of it.  One of those things that seems like it could have simply not happened - but Leareth is right, that there's always some horrible complicated reason why these things happen and it's hard to make them stop.)  It's not clear if Altarrin agreed, or was even capable of agreeing, but he clearly thought it was worth it to for the influence and the chance to make his empire better, and... none of it really worked.  (And so many good people lost to it in the meantime.  He sees Altarrin's fondness for his promising young people and his emperor, and grieves for them.)  Or, it did work, briefly, but-- he doesn't know how much of this he's seeing in Altarrin's notes, and how much in Leareth's broader view of what happened before and after, but... 

If the gods are as you think they are, it... sounds like nearly a trap for you personally, this place.  To keep you spending centuries trying to fix it, while it got worse again the moment you weren't there, so you couldn't make real progress there and couldn't focus on anything else.

...Yes, that seems - not false. 

With the addition that Leareth thinks it was a trap for a lot more people than just him. For so long, the Empire was the top center of trade and scholarship left on the continent, at least east of the mountains blocking off the Haighlei Empire. (Which Karal may not have heard of at all, their only real contact with the rest of the continent is by sea trade with the southern coastal countries like Acabarrin and Velvar. They have... different problems from the Empire, but he wouldn't say it's a good place to live.) Anyway. The Empire was, might still be, a highly efficient mechanism for snatching up everyone born there with talent and ambition - and plenty of people not born there but seeking better opportunities - and turning their efforts toward strengthening and reinforcing that self-perpetuating system, rather than toward anything new. 

He doesn't think the expansions into Oris or Isk were justified on world-improving grounds, no. The Empire was very good at claiming, and half-convincing many of its best people, that its conquests were for genuine humanitarian reasons - that everywhere else in the world was poor and stagnant, kept that way by hostile gods, and that people deserved better, that spreading the (admittedly excellent) infrastructure and education system of the Empire would improve their children's lives. But Oris was doing fine by itself, and its people clearly didn't want or choose to trade their freedom and their right to worship their ancestral gods for better aqueducts and permanent Gates. Separately, there were arguments that it was a threat to the Empire's borders and stability, but even that wasn't, really, enough reason for a war. Leareth suspects the real reason is just, simply, that it served various political interests. 

...Isk, he thinks, genuinely had abysmal quality of life for the (relatively few) people living there, but it's not clear how much the Empire was even able to improve on that, given all the problems, and again it feels obvious that the real reason was the Empire's hunger for land and resources and the exchange of political favors. 

It didn't work. But - it didn't entirely not work, either - 

(- for the first time, a flicker of something closer to a real memory - still hazy and impersonal, but there's a flicker of the great shining canal-Gates, permanent thresholds with a power supply far beyond what any single mage could wield, glowing vibrantly to mage-sight, a hundred tons of grain and other goods sliding through on a barge and instantly two hundred miles away, somewhere that needed them - the Empire more or less didn't have famines, at least not before Leareth moved on and the Empire almost certainly slipped into new depths of corruption, because it was so easy to send food from one place to another, it didn't call for unusual heroism or altruism or brilliant problem-solving on the part of anyone for it to happen -) 

- it was a trap, and he's glad to be free of it. But there's a reason why it was a trap that held him for six hundred years. Even a thousand years later, nowhere else in the continent, maybe nowhere else in the whole world, has canal-Gates. And Leareth does, actually, miss living somewhere where mundane petty problems like a failed harvest were so simple to solve. 

Leareth is curious to find out what his next incarnation wrote about deciding not to return to the Empire, what his diagnosis was of it at the time, but - in a moment, he's going to finish absorbing this first. 

He did want to ask what Leareth wanted his empire to be, what was worth all those centuries of effort - but that, yes, that is an answer.  Not enough of one, given everything else about the place, but one that makes sense, that gestures at the rest of it.  To find the problems that should be easily fixable, and just fix them.  To make it easy for people not to starve, and not just that - to build things, to show people that the world can change for the better instead of staying the same or getting worse.  Karal has not lived in a world that was getting better, can hardly imagine it, but that one alien glimpse of how things could be fills him with yearning.

Why is it that we can't have - canal-Gates, or the hundred other things you must know how to do?  Karse, or Valdemar, or Rethwellan - surely you've tried, or someone has.  What happens?

He wants to know about Leareth's next incarnation too - there are so many questions and so many pieces of context needed to make sense of all this.  But this one is obviously important.

The gods happen, is the short and not-usefully-unpacked answer. ...This is something where Leareth would normally want to present evidence for his claims; he doesn't think Karal should take the Eastern Empire's example as conclusive evidence, given how many reasons there are that Someone might object to it. But - he is, in fact, fairly sure that, for some reason, the gods are deeply resistant to too much change. Leareth's best guess is that it's about Foresight visibility, and - it's not intrinsic to canal-Gates, that they make the future noisier and harder to predict, but it is kind of intrinsic to - being the sort of place where people can build things. Because, given the basic safety and foundation they need, people will build so many things, and others after them will build more on that work, and in a place that really had space for that, even Leareth would end up being surprised by the results a century later. The gods - don't understand mortals very well, Leareth thinks, and so it must be even more confusing. 

He's fairly sure that he had accumulated enough evidence to have reason to think it wasn't just about the Empire, it was everywhere. It's not a judgement you could make in a single lifetime, because actually making the world better is hard, and there are hundreds of reasons for it to fail that don't involve hostile gods. But by the time it's been thousands of years, and every potentially world-changing project by some young clever inventor or scholar or teacher or leader has failed, it starts to look like more than "the problem is difficult". 

Sometimes things do get better. Some things. Rethwellan exists, with its academies. Valdemar is - in many ways a good place, the kind of place that didn't and couldn't exist a thousand years ago. And - forced stability does have its upsides, if it can really be maintained, it means that things can't get as instantly and drastically worse as they did at the moment of the Cataclysm. 

But - it's not good enough. (Leareth recognizes that this is fundamentally a personal value judgement - good enough according to what? Well, according to him).

Karal would like to see the evidence at some point - not because he doesn't believe it, but because he needs stories to hang his understanding of the world from.  But yes, it's obvious once he's seen a glimpse of the idea, people would build so many things.  And it is obvious, on some level, that this was missing - not just from his previous understanding of the world, but from the world itself.  That it's something that would happen, somewhere, and even if it wasn't where he lived, he thinks he would have at some point encountered the concept.  That some intervention must have been needed to make sure he didn't - to make sure he grew up in a world that was missing even the idea of things getting better than they were in the past, in a world that felt like it could only stay the same, or get worse, or improve to recapture old glory but no more than that, because "more" was not a thing anyone could imagine, not a direction anyone knew existed.

Maybe it's true, that the world cannot be better, for some reason.  Maybe the risks are too high, or people cannot handle a world that different.  If it's true that this the gods' doing, perhaps They are right.  Karal, unlike Leareth, could live with that.  But it would hurt, now that he's seen the alternative - it would be a harm done to all of them.  He can hope it's not true, and if it is... his mind still shies away from the blasphemy of questioning the gods' will outright, but he wishes he could have an explanation.

Leareth - does actually really want a records-citation to offer here, and doesn't have one at hand - but he's certain that he would have tried very hard to get that explanation. Including by intermediaries, in case the problem is that the gods are opposed to him in particular. (Leareth thinks that without any particular emotion. It's not like it wouldn't be understandable for the gods to be against him in particular, given his history. He...thinks They would be wrong...but obviously he would think that, it doesn't make it impossible to sympathize.)

There are reasons he could conceive of that it might be worth it. But - ultimately, after all the information he spent centuries gathering, he doesn't think the gods are - really the kind of entity that can explain Their reasoning to humans. Plausibly They aren't and can't be the kind of entity that has human-comprehensible reasons for Their actions at all. They are very large, and very old, and very alien, and - again Leareth is missing most of the context he built this reasoning on, but he thinks that is the part that's the problem. That the gods are acting and making tradeoffs at an enormous scale, and even if there's something genuinely important that They're trying to protect, They aren't - They can't - take into account all the ways that affects people in the world. 

...This is getting kind of close to just explaining the plan, which Leareth thinks he would rather do by reading the relevant notes in the order they had planned; they'll be so much better-organized than his mind is right now. 

Yes.  Karal expects Leareth is right about the gods, but he's starting to feel like he's floating out of context again, too much abstract information with nothing emotionally concrete to connect it to.  Reading more of what exactly past-Leareth was thinking and dealing with will help.  He knows he keeps jumping ahead, or sideways, and cannot really stop having the questions he has, but Leareth is right to want to answer them in a sensible order with all the surrounding information that will make sense of them.

(And if they still want the records-citations later, probably Nayoki will have them, once she's back.)

(Nayoki isn't currently visible, but she did at some point leave the next items in their reading list. And also a cup of tea, which Leareth had noticed, briefly, and then entirely forgotten about.) 

...Leareth can sip some tea, that's a good idea. Nayoki even thoughtfully put a weak warming set-spell on it, so it's at his favorite temperature for tea despite having been abandoned for probably a while. 

And then he'll flip open the next slim but nicely-bound treatise, dated about ten years later, written by the incarnation who called himself Matteir of Twin Rivers. 

Matteir - not the name that the parents of the original body's inhabitant had called him, but a name he chose later, though he really was from a town called Twin Rivers - was born in the city-states of Har, a long way from the Empire. Unlike so many previous times, he - felt he had left it in a reasonably stable state, which might be what gave him the mental space he needed not to immediately hurry back and start rebuilding a power base in order to fix some incipient disaster, and - it was easier, without compulsions, to notice that by the end, Altarrin had been very, very tired. Matteir felt he could justify not returning immediately, and instead taking some time to survey the rest of the continent, unbeholden to compulsions or deadlines or politics. By the time he learned about Bastran IV's death and the ensuing civil war - some months after it happened, since he was far away at the time, and the civil war didn't last too long or cause too much infrastructure damage in its fallout - he must have already been halfway to a final decision, because he didn't go back. 

These particular notes are clearly written by someone actively wrestling with a problem that was both very complicated and very upsetting; there's a lot more emotion leaking through than in Altarrin's tidy summary. It was a very difficult admission for Matteir to make, even to himself, that the Empire was - not precisely a failure, it was busy succeeding wildly at being an Empire, but it very definitely wasn't the vision he had originally shared with the First Emperor, or even particularly aimed in that direction. And for all its enormous resources, which he hated to turn his back on, it wasn't a place where he had very much leverage at all to try aiming for that dreamed-of future again.

He had wanted it to be like Tantara. (Or maybe more like the best strengths of Tantara and Predain combined, since Tantara's happy prosperous equilibrium had turned out to be - fragile - in ways no one at the time had seen coming, but - just rebuilding Tantara as it was would have been enough.) 

Matteir had traveled up and down the entire continent by this point, even as far as the Haighlei Empire (strictly speaking everywhere except Iftel, and this time he had actually tried, in a moment of reckless nothing-to-lose, and been turned away at the border in what seemed like a routine policy-following decision) and been disappointed but not surprised to note that nowhere was like Tantara. Why not? It had existed once. Most records of its history might have been erased, but it hadn't felt like a shocking historical anomaly defying the odds. 

...Matteir didn't know the answer to that question, yet, at the point he was writing. The Empire's orthodoxy would have said it was the gods' fault, and Matteir...didn't feel like he would be surprised if that turned out to be true...but he wasn't taking it at face value. Clearly the Empire's orthodoxy was shaped by all sorts of forces other than the truth. He didn't think he would find the answers to that question back in the Empire, not when he had already reviewed everything from Altarrin's exhaustively documented lifetime of work. Altarrin's life seemed like answer enough. He had lived and worked under almost the best possible circumstances, born with noble blood during an era of mostly-peace, the way paved for him by his less-fortunate previous incarnation. He had been granted nearly a century to work, uninterrupted by any really major disasters until the era of the Oris rebellion, and even that he resolved without - on paper, at least - burning anything irreplaceable. 

And he had still finished his life exhausted and worn down, and having accomplished - what, exactly? Nothing groundbreaking. Nothing that would shift the Empire's momentum. He had, at most, bought them a half-century under an unusually altruistic Emperor, at the cost of both of their happiness. Looking back on it, it had been a lifetime of running in place. 

The Empire wasn't going to fall apart without him, either. That might have been worth staying for; the Empire was, at the very least, feeding nearly thirty million people, most of them farmers and tradesmen and small-town merchants who moved nowhere near the levers of power, who weren't under compulsions and weren't obviously less free than their counterparts anywhere else in the world, and they stood to lose so much if the Empire collapsed. (Matteir, at this point, spent multiple pages agonizing over whether he was able to think about this clearly given how badly he didn't want it to be true that he had to go back, even while at the same time he didn't want to admit that his last centuries' work had been for nothing.) ...No, though, it really seemed like the Empire was pretty unlikely to collapse. However far it had bent and twisted away from the original dream, the infrastructure base was solid, and nearly everyone's incentives were at least pointed at keeping the play going. It would get worse - probably a lot worse, at court - but most people at court were to some extent choosing to be there, trading away ownership of their minds for the chance to be near power, and the further you got from the Emperor, the less...warped...everything would be. The Empire in another century would be - more corrupt, less fair, less just, an uglier caricature of civilization - but, probably, not all that different from the point of view of a peasant smallholder in Tolmassar. ...The conquests could admittedly get a lot uglier. The internal rebellions could get messier and stupider. Tens of thousands of people would die, or have their lives pointlessly torn apart, when that hadn't needed to happen.

Preventing that slide wasn't worth trading away his chance to find anything else that mattered. 

...At least, not for now. Matteir could recognize how much of his own feeling here was about not feeling ready to bear that again. He still remembered Bastran clearly (if anything, Matteir's notes contained a lot more, and more emotional, notes about Bastran than Altarrin's terse summary of the parts that were tactically relevant) and it would hurt too much, returning to an Empire where he wasn't there anymore. 

He didn't really know what to do instead. For the first time in centuries, he had room to breathe, and didn't have a plan. It bothered him, that he didn't know where to go from here, particularly when he could notice so clearly all the mental flinches away from the places he didn't want to go. It felt like running away from an oath he had made and still had yet to fulfill. But - better to admit that, to stare that truth in the face, rather than bounce away from it back to a place where he could burn himself down fulfilling a hollow false statue of it. 

And - there was plenty of world to wander. Plenty of small, local, human points of leverage, where he could build a bridge with magic, or found a school, or identify and train some Healers. He could find ways of helping people that were real, for all that they were small and temporary and unsystematic, he could simply not involve himself in ordering the executions of distant rebels because it was worth it for a greater good he no longer really believed in - 

- and he could work on answering the question, of why Tantara couldn't exist anymore. 

Matteir's pain hurts - and it hurts even more how clear it is that Altarrin was feeling much of the same pain on some level but wasn't letting himself notice (or maybe he only wasn't letting himself write it down, but it feels important, to Karal, that he wasn't) - but he was right, clearly.  The Empire he had built wasn't what he wanted, couldn't be what he wanted, and trying to keep pushing it in a slightly better direction would only prevent him from ever building anything better.  But oh, how awful it must have felt, to be responsible for all these people, for all the centuries of history, and to abandon them, without even a plan for something more important...

It's a relief that Matteir took the time to rest and consider and see the world, to have a life that wasn't full of pressures preventing him from thinking about what he was doing.  To look through, not even his options yet, but the questions he needed to answer.  Karal is so very glad that Leareth knows how to do that, and won't let himself be pushed to something he shouldn't be doing just out of the need to be doing something.  And he's glad that it worked - Matteir's life really does seem to have been better, happier in some sense, for all his grief, and he did find the questions that mattered.  (As if Karal knows what questions matter... He feels like he does, but it can't possibly be true, except maybe from the viewpoint centuries in the future, knowing some of what else happened and some of what Leareth worries about.)

Did he find his answer?  This time Karal has no side questions, just an all-encompassing need to keep reading.