For better and for worse, once the army heard that I in particular was leaving, I did have a bunch of well-wishers come by. A few people actually passed me coins or small gifts, which was unexpected; several asked if I was planning on opening a church, or else they assumed I would and asked where it would be. After flubbing that question at least three times, I decided I'd say something about going on a religious journey, either to find the right place or to try to commune with Xethram. The people who got that answer, like the ones who saw me with no prepared answer, seemed unconvinced or unimpressed. I guess they thought this stuff all came automatically or naturally.

If it wasn't automatic for me, it must be a lot worse for people who are just vaguely in contact with their deity. Unless, of course, their religion is already well-established and they were taught exactly what to say... but that has its own dangers. Ideally, if I ended up with a lot of downtime, I'd need to figure out what to put into a holy text that I hopefully wouldn't end up regretting. Only hopefully, though; if Earth had taught me anything, it's that religions could flat-out ignore huge sections of a holy book.

As I considered that, I let out several very heavy sighs, each of which got me odd looks from the people around me. I suppose that most of the wounded were really only thinking about their wounds, and I was miles away. Of course, due to the soulflame I had used at the time, my body was in a lot better shape than I had any right to complain about. The wounds around me were pretty heinous.

To get my mind off of things, I did end up walking around and taking stock of injuries. I didn't want to, exactly, but my whole speech about looking at awful things in order to change them wasn't just nonsense. I quickly discovered that wound infections were very much a thing, and the medicine we had was utterly inadequate to hold them off. To say nothing of penicillin, I wished I had a spray bottle full of alcohol; it would probably have saved a lot of lives.

As it was, whenever I thought I saw an infection at its earliest stages, I spent a little soulflame on divine healing. It was outside of my discipline, but as long as I was doing something straightforward, like killing off an infection or closing leaking blood vessels, it seemed to do okay, although it was probably an expensive use of soulflame. As it was, there was no way I could heal every person, especially everyone who was badly wounded or badly sickened... especially because most of the healings didn't produce nearly as much soulflame as they consumed, if the wounded person gave anything back at all, and I didn't press them to give back. I suppose I could have gone around giving people a wink and saying, 'You were healed by the god of eyes!' but it just wasn't in me to do that, especially knowing how many people around me were still going to die of their injuries.

As I examined people's injuries, I tried to mentally catalog what I would need to add to an Eye that helped healers. Infections were one obvious thing, and I saw enough burns that I grew to recognize them... same with torn blood vessels, injured organs... I supposed that loose blood or other fluids in the body would count as a problem, but to be honest, I wasn't a doctor, and it would be easy for me to be wrong about things. Inflammation... should be easy to detect. Pinched nerves? Wasn't that a thing? Joint pain?

As I thought and walked among the wounded, trying to piece together a godly ability, I couldn't help feeling amateur. Alanna, when I got a chance to talk to her, could probably help, but what I really needed was a set of biology textbooks from Earth. Somehow, I didn't think those would be in the asking, for any price. If people--even gods--could just get those, this planet would be a far different place.

After a little while of this, I decided to try the "Magic Gifts" version of the magic eye, the magic spell that was easy to cast but supposed to be fairly weak. It was supposed to show me what I already knew, so I wondered if it would just work. The answer... was a pretty clear "no". Even after feeding it information I knew from my divine senses, it couldn't place images very well in 3D space. Most likely if I had a diagram from a book I wanted to reference while I, say, did surgery, it would do that just fine, but I couldn't use it to, say, drop a marker on an infection and then rotate the injured arm to get a better sense of how deep it was. It just didn't seem to do things like that.

I considered the fact for a little while, but it wasn't all that surprising. If anything, it was amazing that the Magic Eye Gift was as good as it was. For a world without computers, a world without advanced medicine, with just magic... it was amazing anything worked, really. When I stopped to think about it, all of it was crazy. How magic could possibly work at all... that was crazy enough, but to then interact with complicated systems it didn't understand?

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I found myself kind of freaking out and took a break riding on the back of one the cart wagons as we rolled west. When I calmed down, the whole matter of magic suddenly seeming crazy had settled down a bit in my head. Most likely, just like with technology, they made small bits of progress one at a time, and had gotten to this solution slowly over time. It would be seriously impressive if someone just sat down and made magic, but that didn't seem to be the case.

Still, especially while I was surrounded by wounded people I couldn't heal, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. My speech about loving people's potential rang hollow when I had to let them die... but at the same time, that was life. I'd sensed the same conflict in Ciel'ostra, and in Alanna. We were gods, but we couldn't just reshape life to make it what we wanted. And if we did... most likely it would just backfire. We'd spend a lot of power only to discover that reality was still reality.

The rest of the day and all of the next were very long. I kept being conscious of injuries, kept trying to keep things from getting worse if they were in the early stages, kept feeling inadequate as I watched people slip towards death. I had to witness several amputations, and each night there were a few burials. No bringing bodies home, not in this army. Then again, at the speed we were going, they'd likely rot before we got there.

After a couple more days, though, thanks at least in part due to my efforts, things stopped getting worse. At around that time, I started getting more prayers from the east, too--the rearguard army was set up around the goblin nest, and Tammy reported (after a fashion) that Raine was now being forced to deal with an enemy army... or several. Without getting information directly from Raine, it was a little difficult, but I let her make her own mistakes. If she got killed... it would be because she didn't ask for help.

Or at least, not soon enough.

The teams exploring the goblin nest seemed to very much appreciate the blessings I gave them--low light vision, and the ability to see anything that might be invisible (though nothing was). I could have pried more deeply into their affairs, but I left them to it. Whenever those links were open, though,I sensed more nervousness than panic on the other end, so I assumed they had not encountered much. Which was fine with me, but I had no idea what their objective was, either--were they just trying to clear out a small bit of the caves, or did they need to explore the depths?

At night, though, the goblin cave team did a lot of praying to me. More, I suspected, than they prayed to the Goddess of Blades. There in the dark, with monsters lurking, it was Eyes that kept them safe. That was touching, in a way. Practically speaking, though, fear-induced prayer seemed only to create the weak blue flame, with hints of silver and green here and there. There was a lot of the stuff, but it wasn't quality. Still... the fact that they found comfort in my help meant a lot to me.

The extra boost of piety I'd gotten after my speech had more or less dried up, of course. There were more followers among those people than there were before, but the wave of excitement had gone. That was... fine. Most likely, until I had a proper church, any worship that I did have would be scattered and transactional. But in the end...

I was thinking about this as I walked, and I had to fight the urge to stop as I realized that there was a real pain point here. To a certain extent, having a church meant letting other people speak for me--surrendering my name so that others could speak "for" me. Alanna had said as much, when I asked her about Vicars, but it was still... an odd thing to think about. If a church leader said a stupid thing, then it had been said, and I either had to accept it or punish it. If I wanted to be hands-off and quiet like Alanna, it would mean letting people say whatever they wanted.

I wanted to spend some time talking with her, but I there were numerous challenges having that kind of conversation while travelling--someone might interrupt me, or her, or someone might notice what was going on. But, I did want to talk. In a way, she and Ciel'ostra were peers, and maybe friends; it was a lot harder to look at the people around me in the same way. If I wanted answers or advice, the people around me could teach me stabbing and maybe a bit of magic, but that was about it.

Still, we were due to reach the capital ...someday soon? I didn't ask, and we were moving slowly. Maybe there would be more there when we arrived--more people with knowledge, with perspective, with wisdom. I would still probably not find anyone who knew half as much as Alanna, who had half as much experience as Murn, but... but whatever I could do to expand my world, and not only interact with other gods and goddesses, the better.

Earth history had enough examples of insular communities who thought they knew better than the rest of the world, and just looked like idiots in the grand scheme of things. I really wanted to avoid that fate... not just for myself, if I could do anything to convince others. To do that, I'd need perspective... and perspective required experience.

The army marched onward.