She has a lot of followup questions she wants to ask – the magic source doesn't pick any and it works for any orphans? – but she has the feeling that these are Val questions.

"Zoriana want attend more Sathend magic, Zoriana want attend Val?"

"Yeah, I can tell you stuff but I just know what everyone knows."

"Who governs in Sathend?"

Alyssa can list the names of everyone in the legislature and explain how voting works.

Zoriana gets more of a sense of Sathend society. She thinks they might get along well with Andoran.

And soon enough, the junior cleric pokes Val with another piece of disappearing paper and Val can understand Varisian Sign. He also has some intuitions for the spoken and written language Taldane but still cannot perceive any in his environment.

"...Wow. That’s really weird - I wonder if I can talk with my mouth..." Val doesn’t actually test that immediately, though.

"Might be possible but you'd probably pronounce things really weirdly. …First things first, I'm not from a society that's had a massive catastrophe around 500 years ago. The historic catastrophe everyone knows about is Aroden's death 105 years ago but we still have plenty of records from before then."

"What happened then?"

"Prophecy – that's magic for predicting the future – stopped working properly. The Worldwound, a massive planar rift between here and the Abyss, opened. All of Aroden's clerics stopped getting spells, of course. Catastrophic storms and earthquakes occured – the Shatterfield still quakes regularly and the Eye of Abendego is a massive hurricane that's still going, and there used to be population centers there. Cheliax fell into civil war and Lung Wa fell apart."

"Well, probably if that had anything to do with our apocalypse and there were some kind of time dilation or we got the year length wildly wrong, our ancestors would have left before most of that happened. What did the leadup look like?"

"I wasn't present for it, but my understanding is that it looked just like Aroden was going to incarnate in Cheliax and lead the world into an age of glory and prosperity, right up until he didn't."

"That's not our apocalypse."

"Also, what?"

"Aroden was a god. A god is a kind of powerful entity that gives people magic. Gods tend to be far away from places like this and give magic to people who share their values or otherwise do things they like. There are also weaker entities that do this, it's hard to draw a sharp line, but 'god' tends to refer to the stronger ones. I get magic from a god called Desna but some people get magic other ways."

"A planar rift is an opening between two different planes, which are regions of space where no matter how far you do normal movement you're still in the same plane. The Abyss is a plane where some people go when they die. It's full of demons, who are more cruel than most humans are capable of being, and so having a rift between the Abyss and somewhere else is a problem for the somewhere else."

"Uh. Wow. What. That's fucked up."

"How do you pay Desna?"

"I heal people. I make very good maps and I give them to the right people for free. I pray for an hour every dawn, of course. In my youth I fought monsters that preyed on travelers and helped people leave bad places especially when other people tried to keep them there – I still do those sometimes, but less. Sometimes I lead services to her, or maintain her shrines, or copy her scrolls, or help someone understand their dreams."

She pauses. "To be clear, I don't pay for individual spells, unless you count praying every dawn. Clerics don't tend to stop getting power just because they stop doing things, they tend to only lose that power if they turn away from their god or the god dies. But the sort of person who becomes a cleric often isn't the sort of person to stop doing things, and if you stop doing things you won't get stronger."

"That honestly sounds too good to be true."

"A lot of people die, this way. A lot of people don't make it to my age. Bevaluu is a courageous woman. I've met people who were like her when she was younger. They usually don't make it to Elysium." She shivers.

"And if you don't take any risks at all you end up healing people a few times a day and creating water and maybe doing some translation or blessing some water or breaking up some brawls. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's hardly traveling between worlds without a tuning fork or conjuring gold that lasts. Not to say that you don't get a bad deal, of course."

"Well, before I heard about magic you don't even have to keep paying for, I would have said I was getting a good deal. I still think I get the best deal our god was able to offer us. I think - there are a lot of ways things would be different if it didn't care, a lot, about giving us a good deal. I like my life. - Do you have trouble conjuring things that last in general and do you want anything more urgently than gold?"

"I don't urgently want anything. I don't understand what's hard and easy for your magic and you're pretty limited in supply, that's a terrible starting point for asking for magic favors. I do wonder if anyone who's smarter than I am knows how to attune a fork on you so you can save on transit."

She chuckles. "If you could conjure working diamond I'm sure you'd have your pick of casters for a Gate." It's pretty clear that she doesn't think this is likely, though.

"'Working' in what sense?"

"Usable as an ingredient for magic. Alyssa told you about the pieces of paper you two got poked with, right?"

"Yeah. How would you know if it would work that way?"

"When I've heard of people having issues they're usually because the gem is too small or it's just not the right material even if it's nice and clear and sparkly, but I don't hear about everything. I think some people – probably some people in this town – can inspect gems well enough to make a good guess, but the obvious way is just to try it and see. If it's not hard for you to conjure enough for a Restoration, we can try for that, otherwise we can probably rustle up someone willing to do an experimental Nondetection. Or you can go to the Cathedral of Abadar, we have our disagreements but they're honorable with their business partners and I'm sure they get a lot more gem sales than we do."