Ranara and her little daughter Azabel move to Urtho's Tower when the latter can say six words ("up", "mama", "milk", "no", "now", and "please") and hasn't started to walk yet. Ranara sets up to teach little children to read, ones who don't have evident Gifts yet - Ranara herself has Mindspeech, is all, with about a classroom's worth of range. Azabel sits in on classes, worn on her mother's back or later plopped in a corner with toys or, when she's only four, plopped in a corner with a book, younger than the other kids in the class. When Azabel has in fact sat through her mother's curriculum she is turned somewhat loose, to walk very carefully up and down and around the Tower, exploring.
The Star-Eyed seems less into earthquakes and setting things on fire. She has spirit avatars that can travel around in the spirit world, and human priests and shamans can project their minds there and talk to them for advice, and sometimes convey messages or requests. The avatars apparently tend to be cryptic. There are claims of getting warning about natural disasters and such before they happened, but of course, human long-range Foresight can do this too.
"She's less destructive and spends more - surface area on trying to talk, though I'm not sure how to cash that out in terms of effort or anything since she seems pretty bad at talking clearly," Aza reports.
"Mmm. I wonder if they'd let us talk to the spirit guardian things or if you need to be a shaman."
"No, none of these books were that helpful, but I think I found the right references to look up in the library next time."
"It sounds interesting, I wonder if there's stuff there besides god-avatars. Not that those aren't potentially interesting."
"It does seem interesting! And...maybe we could learn to go there, even if the avatars won't talk to us?" Shrug. "I'll look in the library and we can ask the shaman when we have a chance to go see them."
Ma'ar catches her up a bit more on the contents of various books he's skimmed, and then excuses himself to help Aala with her homework before it's time for her to go to bed.
The Kaled'a'in temple to the Star-Eyed Goddess isn't much to look at on the outside; a simple, low stone building, with a garden out front.
A youngster meets them and, when told they're here to see Summerhawk, ushers them in.
Summerhawk is waiting in a simple stone room, its furnishings very basic; a rug, which she's kneeling on, and a low wooden table, which has a book on it.
"Hello?" she says.
"Oh, yes! Welcome. Lionwind told me that you two would be coming by - you have questions about our Goddess?"
"I'm curious about gods in general, but Her as a special case, sure. I guess Her in particular because She's got a people who are Hers and most of them don't do that so much..."
"Also I cannot help so much with your questions about other gods, though I could direct you to Their temples if you wished. What did you want to know about Her?"
"Hmm. That is quite an interesting question - and I must first caveat that I do not know Her mind and so cannot say for sure. But - my understanding, here, is that She - and all of the gods - have only a limited presence in the material plane, unless They have mortals to work through. And They are very, very big; we are as ants compared to them, or even lesser; and, while this means They can see and fight threats to the safety of the world that we cannot, just as an ant could not see a tidal wave coming, it also means that many important things happen at a scale too small for Their senses. And so there is a collaboration; we can help Her, by using our prayers and requests to tell Her what is needed on our tiny local scale, and She can use us as a window into this plane."
"Can She do things on the tiny local scale particularly usefully if She's metaphorically so huge?"
"Sometimes! She can do healings, or - answers prayers to bring rain, say, when Her senses on the greater scale show Her that they will have particularly needed effects."
"Is there something that makes her better at that than a weather-mage or a Healer?"
"Well, She is not limited on power as a human would be, right? We have cases in our histories of miraculous healings when there were many human Healers there and there was nothing more they could do. And other cases of very critical moments where a Gifted Healer was not available. And for weather magic in particular, She has the advantage of seeing the bigger patterns, right? And so we can be sure that She is aware of whether She is taking away someone else's badly needed rain, and that if so She has weighed it up and judged it worthwhile."
"I am not sure of what weighs on Her mind. But - She cares about the stability of the world and its ecosystems, and She has duties to those specific peoples who She accepts as Her own."