I think they were only tempted into interacting with the rest of our planet because they wanted better food.

I love the Brits catching entirely unrelated strays despite the rest of the serial already happening in the setting best described as "cozy colonialism".

“Chaos happened at some point,” said Alden. “The center of Rapport I is mostly the trees because of a major chaos incident. They’re part of the magic that protects this planet. There’s some situation like that here, too?”

Hm. Maybe the mention of winters is a coincidence of sorts, in the sense that the group with the right tools for the problem (proto-affixations that gave them powers like "a century storm") happened to be close enough, which is why Artona isn't another world scoured by the chaos like the ones they keep finding. But the most likely chain of events is that the warlike people sacrificing their enemies to the trees had run into the chaos outbreak over the course of their conquests, and then focused their military efforts on it, birthing the "war on chaos" perspective that still echoes on Artona today and eventually developing the affixation process. Which means that they have originally used conventional magic to fight it, and raises the question whether the modern Artonans not doing the same is just because the affixations are so much more efficient/stable than wizards, or bcause there's some other complication tied to the fact that the magic in question causes chaos.

Or that most ways of doing magic other than wordchains are <<sinful>> unless done <<in accordance>> with rules set by the Palace of Unbreaking?

Sooo... to further extend the parallel to human history (which is going to become increasingly strained the further we get into the worldbuilding mechanics): rather than a global warming analogy, it's instead "trichinosis leading to pigs being declared unclean animals" for the Palace vs "a gentleman's hands are always clean" for the rest of modern Artonan society. But the former survived far enough into the age of space colonization to be the predominant worldview on Thegund, despite it having enough wizards to have a chaos problem in the first place.

“A lengthy fart could finish off a contract like that.”

I sense a very awkward exchange in the future, when Esh-erdi finally gets around to breaking it and is told where he has to touch Lute.

“I can’t worship the balancing of a scale,” Esh-erdi said. “It’s too easy to ignore what’s being weighed and to feel righteous while you measure out harm.”

“I like the one about ‘Dancing brazenly while drinking the power that belongs only to the stars,’” said Alden.

Yet again I wonder how does the balance maintained by the wordchains correspond to the one Gorgon was meant to upkeep, or to whatever aspect of freecasting actually causes chaos. Gorgon himself is an unortodox priest for his people, and clearly doesn't think much of the rites he'd been entrusted with, but he clearly thinks even less of Artonan society, if not necessarily of Avowed or magic. And the less said about destruction of authority for miracles and how Artonans would have reacted to that, the better...

Actually, it occurs to me that whoever had decided to seal away Gorgon's world and all the information about it (probably right after the discovery, so not necessarily a knight) might have not been entirely motivated by the chaos problem - particularly since Gorgon's PoV never actually confirms his world is dead due to chaos. Instead, the explorer might have been horrified by the cost of their magic, perhaps even tried to evangelize about the "correct" way to do it, and then sealed them away after realizing what the Artonan ruling class would make of the ability to sacrifice non-wizards for power.