"True." He shakes his head. "It doesn't make sense the Valar didn't know, and doesn't make sense they wouldn't tell us."

"Because they'd know this in particular, or because they know everything analogous?"

"They created the world, they should technically know everything about it except consequences of the actions of people, and this can't be caused by that -"

"A lot of it is, but almost definitely not the existence of spirits et cetera. And if they know, the Enemy should.

You say they created the world, was this a collective thing? Any chance of accidents or at least secretive side projects?"

"Yeah, actually, there are several sentient species of precedent for that."

"Which, accidents or secrets?"

"The latter. No accidents that I know of."

"Does this seem like at all the kind of thing any Vala would have done?

Though I'm not sure this makes any sense, since my world has the same magic and doesn't have the same origin story."

"It really doesn't. There are some of them I don't understand, but - it's not much like the known side projects."

"How long ago was this world created? Mine's very old, but we only have theories about whether magic was there all along so this might not help."

"We're the only sentient race that has yet awakened, and we're - hmm, seven hundred years old? The world itself is older."

"We're in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, depending on how you count, and Others have never not existed as far as anyone knows. That may or may not mean they predate us. Our planet is four billion, our universe thirteen, and by some theories Others have been around the whole time. Not necessarily magic; the practice as we know it was invented.

But our years are measured by the Sun. Might not mean much here."

"Oh. Yes, I have no idea how long your years are. Who invented the practice, and how?"

"This is all old enough that it could easily be just wrong. But people used to be very superstitious, helped by the fact that a lot of the superstitions were true and others had Others conform to them. So the ones who did break through the barriers to knowing about what's really going on could keep track of which superstitions worked, use them for their own ends, and the practice evolved from that. Developed might be a better word than invented, but the point is it doesn't predate humans. A king named Suleiman three thousand years ago had more influence on it than any other single practitioner—we still use something mostly similar to his version of the awakening ritual—but there's no single inventor."

"Does he still have extra influence? Do the spirits remember - oh, I'm sorry, never mind, he must be long dead. People here would have been superstitious, there were plenty of mundane horrors out there."

"Maybe not only mundane ones. Mundane horror is an easy disguise for an Other one.

Solomon does still have extra influence. He's the reason innocents are protected, and him being the reason for that is the reason why it applies more to older Others."

"So it's starting to apply less and less over time?"

"In a sense. Anything three thousand years old that hasn't been affected yet probably isn't going to be, but his big accomplishment was getting it established as normal. The universe likes its statuses quo. So newer Others find themselves under pressure to agree not to harm bystanders, and even the ones that haven't agreed don't press their luck too much because they're going against the grain. I think it's in equilibrium at "mostly true.""

"That's good, at least. I wish I had a better sense of how long our years are compared to yours."

"We'll get one once I've been here longer. Saying a year is however many hundred or thousand times since I arrived probably wouldn't mean much."

"No. I'd ask the length of a year relative to the gestation period of your species but I'm not sure we'd even be able to infer much from that."

"You did have elephants here. Theirs is... I think more than a year? Probably not too much more, but I really wasn't expecting to need to know this."

"Regrettably I don't think I know the gestation period of our elephants either. Irissë?"

"More than a year, less than ten," she says.

"So the years are closer than a factor of ten, if our elephants are the same.

This is kind of ridiculous. I'll just tell you when it's been a day, and a year is three hundred sixty-five of those."

"Our year is seventeen hundred twenty eight of our days, but we don't have days anymore because there's no light."