Lissa, who's been doing stretches and exercises in the corner, watches her brother go upstairs, and then wanders over. "I'm ridiculously bored. Anything I can help with? I can ask Bar for entertainment if it'd be more annoying than it's worth giving me something to do, but I'd rather be useful." 

"...uh, sure. I'm gonna give you a guide to creating realistic imaginary cultures and you can fill it out for where you live to give me an at a glance summary of stuff it'd be easy to forget to mention." He hands her a packet and a pen.

"Sure!" This is a lot less boring than she was expecting. (Lissa is not, generally speaking, a reader of dense books.) 

And in Cam's reading:

The early years of the Empire don’t exactly go smoothly. (Relatedly, the records are sketchy, and the historian’s account is guessing at the gaps).

About two decades into the project, they’ve built a capital city, and wrestled back control of several hundred miles to the south and west. Trade exists. Mages are being trained. There aren’t nearly enough of them, so there are financial incentives for the existing mages to pair up and have children.

This is the point at which the Emperor and most of his advisors, Arved among them, perish in a (somewhat surprisingly) successful assassination attempt by a priest-mage of an obscure religious sect.

There follows a messy succession crisis. After ten years of various coups and counter-coups, during which much of the progress made falls apart, the second Emperor takes the Iron Throne. He sets out the official Imperial Law code, which is heavily based around the theory that financial deterrence is more effective than physical punishment. For example, the punishment for rape, first offence:


The victim would be granted immediate status as a divorced spouse. Half of the perpetrator's possessions went to the victim, half of the perpetrator's wages went to the victim for a term of five years if there was no child, or sixteen if a child resulted. If the child was a daughter, she received a full daughter's dowry out of whatever the perpetrator had managed to accumulate, and if the child was a son, the perpetrator paid for his full outfitting when he was conscripted.

The second Emperor faces a number of problems, somewhat different from those of his predecessor. One of them is that, during the disastrous intervening years, many mages got into the habit of using blood-magic. It’s understandable – magic is working normally again, but the ambient sources of it, ley-lines and nodes, are still replenishing. Given the state of the land, it’s impossible to feed the population without Gating supplies around, and a mage needs power to Gate. Not to mention all the very important and half-complete infrastructure projects that could be done if the mage-energy was available…

However, blood-power has various negative effects: on the land, on its user, and, of course, on the unfortunate peasant or convict murdered for it. It would be preferable, if they need to resort to it at all, to at least do so efficiently. The second Emperor responds by formally legalizing blood-magic, and then tightly regulating it: only Adepts with specific training are permitted, in approved circumstances, they check the land for traces of it and anyone caught using it unapproved will be executed.

The second Emperor rules with a much tighter fist than the first, and manages to stay in power for almost forty years. Twenty years in, after several incidents, he legalizes the use of compulsion-spells for all government workers, along with the sworn oath of office, to prevent assassination plots from within. Thirty years, half a dozen more increasingly ludicrous attempts on his life, and he cracks down on religious groups and introduces a state religion of ancestor worship. He also studies life extension magics. Before having the chance to personally use them, he dies in a mildly implausible spell-research accident; assassination is suspected but never confirmed. The Empire passes peacefully to his next-in-line.

The third Emperor, trained in the same spells, lives to age 140, ruling for 90 of those, alongside several different surprisingly talented scholar-advisors (the first dies when an extremely well-engineered bridge collapses on him; the second is inexplicably murdered by a Shin'a'in Swordsworn wandering absurdly far from home). The Empire at this point is at peace, generally well-run, and one of the most authoritarian governments in the known world. 

"Not paranoia if they're really out to get you," Cam mutters.

Vanyel is busy completely failing to sleep. He doesn't really have an excuse (although possibly the coffee isn't helping); he's suitably exhausted, and managed to fall asleep quickly at first, but...the usual nightmares, and now his idiotic brain deciding to chew on what the Karsite newspapers would've said during the war if Karse had newspapers. (Nasty things about him in particular, he's pretty sure.) He could talk to Yfandes but he's sort of still mad at her for questioning whether they ought to help Cam in the first place. 

"Fine," he mutters to himself eventually, "this is dumb." He reluctantly drags himself out of the very comfortable bed, and sheepishly creeps back into the main bar area. "Er, Cam? Sorry to bother you, it's just – I can't sleep, this happens sometimes, I have herbs I take for it but I don't have them here and I don't really want to open the door to get them. Would you mind making them for me, um, if that's specific enough for it to work?" 

"Uh, it isn't - I could do 'whatever's on your nightstand' or equivalent if you want? Or you could ask Bar to prescribe something."

Vanyel stares into space for a while, trying to remember if it's on his nightstand or in his packs or, worst of all, somewhere random on the floor. (He is not a fan of travel.) 

"Um, maybe grab my travel bag if that works?" He's going to want other things in it anyway, and if they're not there he can ask Bar. Possibly he should ask Bar anyway, if she can produce stuff from other worlds then she might have something that works better. 

Bag!

"Thank you!" Vanyel digs around, and the herbs are there, but he'll ask Bar anyway because why not, now he has all the unspent Herald-stipend bags that he shoved into his luggage. 

Bar recommends this hot vanilla flavored beverage for his purposes!

Vanyel drinks it, and considers the merits of going upstairs again versus curling up on one of the couches by the fire. Upside: proximity to people, his sister in particular, and Yfandes even though he's sort of ignoring her. Downside: it's not out of the question that he could end up projecting a nightmare at everyone. 

People wins out, and he checks his shields very carefully and then smushes himself up on the couch. 

The packet asks Lissa a lot of questions that either don’t make sense at all, or where she doesn’t know what all of the words mean, but she can give it a go.

She isn’t sure how ethnic diversity compares to the ‘real world’, but Karsites are clearly a different stock from most Valdemarans. She’s never actually met one of the Tayledras but presumably they’re different again, and there are all sorts of other countries to the south.

She doesn’t know how long people have been in the world, or how they came to be there, but she doesn’t think they came from a different world.

There are about half a million people in Valdemar. She guesses the total population on the continent is around ten million, maybe as much as twenty, but there isn’t an official number. Haven, the capital of Valdemar, has somewhere in the vicinity of fifty thousand inhabitants if you could the settlements outside the current walls; it’s a very big city. Forst Reach Village has a thousand and is considered quite a substantial town.

There are nonhuman intelligent species! Lissa isn’t sure she knows all of them but she provides an incomplete list. Hertasi are lizards, she’s never met one but apparently they’re really, really absurdly helpful, Van said a mage from before the Cataclysm designed them to be that way. There are Companions, obviously. There are the Tayledras bondbirds Van talks about, Lissa knows that they’re cleverer than normal birds and can talk (in Mindspeech) but aren’t as clever as people. There are Suncats, which are like Companions except in Karse, as emissaries of their god Vkandis Sunlord. Legends talk about gryphons but she isn’t sure if they’re real.

...Aaaaand now she's bored and she's going to go get another drink, surely she's been awake for enough candlemarks to make that reasonable. 

Bar will give her what she seeks.

And in Cam's book: 

The next two hundred years of the Empire's history pass in fits and starts. The third Emperor rules for seventy years – life extension magic is useful for that – and expands the Empire's territory significantly. At this point they aren't exactly conquering; they're still ahead of the curve in terms of rebuilding civilization, and are absorbing land that no one in particular is ruling. Magic continues to stabilize in the aftermath of the Cataclysm. Techniques are invented to clear out some of the magical fallout – they aren't as effective as the rumoured work of the new Tayledras people further west, but they'll do. Permanent Gates are built. Crop yields improve. Trade blossoms. There isn't much of an Empire-wide education system yet, but the capital, Jacona, now has an academy and hosts dozens of crafts guilds. 

The fourth Emperor – who also wrote several treatises, the style of which mildly resemble Arved's – runs a brief experiment in democracy. It fails spectacularly, mainly because the top three candidates die in various unlikely ways before the final vote is counted. The fourth-up runner is technically the People's Emperor for about four years before a rebellion orchestrated by an underground religious sect breaks out. The main permanent Gate terminus in the capital is destroyed. Riots erupt. Tens of thousands of people starve before the transport of goods into the city can be restored. 

The old Imperial charter is restored, and the fifth Emperor rules for a hundred and twenty years. (A particularly clever scholar joins his team of advisors early in his reign, leads research efforts into perfecting the life extension magics). Long life is good for stability. Perhaps less good for the freedom of the people, but at least food is reaching the places where people are. Jacona's population hits a hundred thousand. Schools are built in outlying towns and rural areas.

The Empire's next round of expansion involves taking over some existing kingdoms. They're rather badly run, though, and probably their people are better off as citizens of the Empire. 

This is going to be such an interesting conversation when Cam talks to this guy if Cam winds up deciding he can reasonably have anything to say.

The rest of the Empire's history becomes gradually less interesting. If there are unusually creative and clever scholars or advisors sprinkled among the rest, they don't stand out much, but magical research continues to advance. Concert-work temporary Gates are perfected, and soon become commonplace. Weather magic is incredibly sophisticated, now, and crop failures are almost unheard of. While the Empire is very far from egalitarian, it's still more true there than anywhere else that an intelligent and hardworking commoner can obtain an education and rise to a position of great importance. The criminal justice system is a well-oiled machine – oh, certainly some highly-placed people are able to skirt by without punishment, but for a commoner, the streets of a city in the Eastern Empire are among the safest place to be in the known world. Every once in a while, bribery, internal conspiracies, or illegal use of compulsions or blood-magic are uncovered within the bureaucracy, and suitably punished and rooted out. 

The Emperors regularly live to two hundred and rule for a hundred and fifty of those years. Succession isn't free of drama, but usually this comes in the form of fierce behind-the-scenes political wrangling in the decade before an Emperor's expected death, and the actual ascent of a new Emperor is bloodless. Assassinations are next to unheard of; it's difficult to kill a leader when the best mages in the Empire are vying to serve in their Court and, of course, take the expected oaths and loyalty-compulsions. 

The internal investigations become rarer. Eight hundred years in, they still happen occasionally, but tend to have obvious political motivations. It's unspoken but taken for granted that there will be internal conspiracies, and highly-placed officials will obviously bind their own subordinates with illegal compulsions and even try to sneak their agents into the Emperor's Court. Use of blood-magic (usually used with convicts, but those are more and more likely to be political prisoners, or prisoners-of-war from new conquests) skirts by the letter of the law, but no longer especially obeys it in spirit. 

The author of the text doesn't say it in so many words, but Cam might notice that the Empire begins to resemble a carefully-built machine now running on its own, without the supervision of its creator. 

It's a remarkably stable machine. The Empire is still extant, with the same Imperial Law (at least in theory), at least sixteen hundred years after its inception. 

Cam idly makes a teeny desk-size model of the capital city as of the last time covered by his reading.

The next book, "A Lesson on Lessons", is much more recent than the Empire's founding, only nine centuries old. (The history tome did briefly mention some reforms to the academies and examination system in the ensuring century, but the title and author's name were too obscure to warrant a mention.) It lays out theories of pedagogy, the importance of training the teachers, the relevance of tests that can be run identically across the entire Empire, and thus give results that can be compared, when it comes to selecting which candidates from outlying provinces will be accepted to the central academy in Jacona. It discusses tests that measure specific learning, versus raw potential, and under what conditions to use which one. 

It's...not quite the same style as Arved's writings. It's not a grand vision, or even especially a policy proposal; at most, after all the discussion it offers some modest recommendations. Still, some resemblance shines through. 

At this juncture Cam tires of using stylistic resemblance and conjures the title pages (alone) of the complete works of Leareth to see what names are written on them and who they correspond to in the histories.

It's quite an extensive list! 

There are about two hundred title pages that look like published treatises, on various topics – economics, math, architecture, city planning, it goes on and on. 

There are also, interestingly, a set of numbered 'Personal Records' titles, each with a name and a date range. The numbers run from three to forty-two (fourteen and twenty-nine are also missing). The date ranges are everything from eight months to ninety-five years, with a trend toward earlier numbers covering shorter periods. The names very nicely match up with the ones on the various published treatises. 

Arved, the second Emperor, the third Emperor's two ill-fated advisors, the fourth Emperor, and various authors of works mentioned in the Empire's later history all correspond to names on the list. 

Cam makes a list of all the names and refers to it throughout his reading.

And there's a book on theories of magic! This one is much more recent, only three centuries or so, and it doesn't look as polished – more like someone's personal notes, bound for convenience and maybe shared with a few friends but not widely. The name matches Leareth's record-keeping name from the appropriate dates. 

Vanyel and Leareth's world is known to have multiple planes, described as similar to parallel dimensions that have some permeability and interaction with each other. Mage-energy is a sort of universal fuel, able to affect the matter of any plane in a very large number of ways – and to build passages between them. Invisible to un-Gifted humans, it nonetheless behaves somewhat like water, gathering into river-like ley-lines and eventually into dense, turbulent 'nodes' of power. What makes a person Gifted is that they possess 'channels' in their mind, which can take in mage-energy and direct it to some useful purpose. 

Different planes have widely varying levels of ambient mage-energy. Human mages and those of other intelligent races can, via using mage-energy form purely mental projections to other planes. 

The plane where humans live is generally called the mundane or material world. The spirit world, also referred to as the Moonpaths and/or Ethereal Plane, is believed to be where dead spirits reside, although they're difficult both to find and to communicate with even for Gifted people capable of visiting. There are additionally four Elemental Planes (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), named by some long-dead mage for metaphorical resemblance and not because the comparable mundane substances originate there. All are much 'hotter' than the mundane world, in terms of their density of ambient mage-energy. Beings of varying levels of intelligence and power live there, able to dimly sense the mundane world, and mages can summon them by opening a passage that allowing said being to project a magically-constructed body.

The Abyssal Plane is host to 'demons' (an image of something with a random-seeming body plan consisting mostly of legs and eyes), which can also be summoned, although they're very stupid and the only reason to do so is if the mage wants something dead in a messy and disturbing fashion. The Empyreal Plane is believed to exist, and be the primary home of the gods (which are fully multiplanar beings, able to influence all of the other planes), but outside the reach of mages.

There's also the Void, which is a sort of sink – adjacent to all of the planes, it becomes the eventual resting place for all mage-energy, which is eventually returned via some sort of weather-like cycle that isn't fully understood even by Leareth. His top theory is that living things (in all planes), known to be generators of excess mage-energy, are actually pulling from the Void. Space is known to behave differently in the Void; Gates exploit this by routing through the Void to link two places that are distant in mundane-world space. 

Leareth adds the novel hypothesis that the sentient races in the mundane world – those capable of Mind-Gifts – are also multiplanar beings, that a 'Mind plane' exists, separate from the spirit world, and that humans and other races have metaphysical appendages of some kind extending into it. He thinks that routing through this plane could explain why Mindspeech and similar Gifts are so widely found, and how a Thoughtsenser can read the thoughts of anyone, Gifted or not. 

Leareth also theorizes that the Gift of Fetching, the part of it where objects can instantly be transported long distances, works by cutting through the Void in a similar way to Gates, though through a dedicated mind-channel that doesn't leak characteristic Void-energy in the same way. 

Cam writes the outline of a letter, though while all this is interesting it's neither something he has an angle on nor something that will let these people help him.

The rest of the book is mostly some even less organized notes on weird phenomena related to Gates.

Gates don't have to be built on a threshold, though it takes incredible mental discipline for a mage to build one in thin air. Gates don't have to face the same orientation – a clever mage who's mastered threshold-less Gates might, for example, jump down into one built flat on the ground and come flying out somewhere else at his enemies. 

Gates don't always need a specific destination. A mage can instead anchor on an artifact if they know its magical signature, even if they don't know where the artifact is. 

Permanent Gates don't have to be anchored on a threshold either; they do need a focus and a power-seed, but the focus can be a person. The book neutrally mentions a long-ago historical case of a mage successfully attempting this; the name of said mage matches one of Leareth's past lives. The power nearly killed said mage, and left his body fragile, but until the end of his life he could instantly and effortlessly Gate back to the other home terminus, without actually needing to raise a threshold that enemies might follow him through. 

Two ends of a Gate terminus don't have to be in the same plane. A mage could raise a Gate directly to the Elemental Plane of Fire, for example. Which has been tried, because it seems there are people crazy enough to try anything. It mostly results in a very loud explosion – that Plane being much 'hotter' than the mundane world in terms of mage-energies, a rapid 'downhill' flow of power ensues, shortly ending in the death of the mage and collapse of the Gate. Leareth wonders if this is the secret behind the incredible power available to Adepts of the reclusive White Winds school. You can also Gate directly to the Abyssal Plane, if for some inexplicable reason you wanted to. 

Gates...don't always work like Gates. There's a reported incident of a mage – not a very competent one, it sounds like – attempting the spell from instructions in an old book, not knowing its purpose, and accidentally snatching up a different Adept mage who had been in the process of stepping through a Gate several hundred miles away. It's bizarre and hard to believe, but the source is reliable, so Leareth speculates on whether this is a case of Gating imitating Fetching. Both route through the Void, after all. Fetching from a distance can only grab a precisely known object from a precisely known location; in this case, the mage was able to nab a random Adept, but only because he happened to be the only Adept in the world midway through a Gate and thus closer than usual to the Void.

Leareth thinks that this was only a necessary component because the spell would otherwise be underspecified, and fail in the same way that a Gate fails if the mage's sense of his destination is hazy. The Gift of Fetching isn't very flexible, but he muses on whether it would be possible to develop an equivalent spell to Fetch a known artifact from anywhere, as in the case of Gating with said artifact as the destination, or even to Fetch a particular Adept if the mage knew them and their magic intimately enough. 

The section ends without saying whether such a spell was ever developed.