see," she asked, pointing at the cavern floor.
He came and stood beside her, looking where she pointed. "I see a map of the world," he answered, sounding faintly puzzled. "There is another inside, in color, and I think there may still be some maps on velum here as well."
Oh.
She gazed down at the shapes laid out on the ground below—continents, oceans, which were which? She couldn't tell. But somehow seeing them did as much to make the Allimir real as this whole temple had. With every image she saw, the world became wider and more vivid, more real. 
More dangerous.
A fantasy couldn't hurt you. In proper stories, the hero always won—and certainly Vixen came out on top in every episode of The Incredibly True Adventures. But Glory wasn't fool enough to imagine those rules held true for real life. She supposed that somewhere in the back of her mind, for sanity's sake, she'd been holding on to the hopeful notion that this was all some sort of role-playing, with everyone improvising their way toward a foreordained outcome that let the hero win.
But despite magic, despite long pink robes and funny-sounding names, despite weird-looking livestock and strange Oracles, there weren't any certainties. The only thing that was looking more certain with every heartbeat was that stupid unfair things could happen just as easily here as in the world she'd left.
Which meant she could die. And as far as she could tell, the Allimir were the only ones in this brave new world who'd taken an oath of pacifism.
She sighed, feeling tireder than she had a right to, and followed Belegir into the temple.
She'd expected to see a lot of pomp and circumstance—thrones and altars and whatnot—but what there was instead was a large anteroom that led immediately into a sort of hiring hall space. Here the walls were unornamented, covered with a plain coat of homely whitewash, the worn stone floor set with rows of polished wooden benches soft and smooth with age and use. At the top of the room there was a dais with two deep stone cisterns (now empty) flanking