apostatised | [log] we talked about the subjectivity of morals

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[log] we talked about the subjectivity of morals

Every now and again the opportunity to show someone (show off) his library arises and one of these days Martel won't immediately leap on it, but presumably that day is not today. He spends part of the morning ensuring that he can have at least two days free next week and nothing on that can't be rescheduled at the last minute to make room for those - he didn't know Enfys very well, but she was important to Candice and so she was important to him - and much of the rest of it making himself conveniently available to his aforementioned wife if she should like his company.

(He cancels everything that'd take him away from home before the week after next, and decides it'd be inappropriate to go to Tryst without her; he'll get around to apologizing to Hasi for skipping that 'personal invitation' sooner or later.)

In the afternoon, as promised (or bizarrely alluded to) Ewar is dispatched to 'collect' one (1) Henry Jekyll from the nexus. The wards have to be adjusted slightly to let him in, and mostly this means that no one can actually go directly to the castle from the nexus; there's a carriage waiting outside the estate's boundaries, which Henry will find himself hustled into by the aforementioned friendly kilt-wearing swordmaster.

(They weren't sure if he can ride, you see.)

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Henry spends most of these proceedings trying not to stare and failing; also being intensely grateful for the carriage (...the carriage) due to how speculation previously mentioned is utterly correct, he has not been near a horse since some time in childhood. Maybe it was at camp.

The kilt goes unremarked upon, due to how Henry is a very smart man. He has a PhD, you know!

The carriage is nice, as they go; the subtle fact of wealth in lieu of anything obnoxiously ostentatious, presumably because Martel's vanity extends in a five mile radius and he is, actually, a man of impeccable taste. That said, it's not a long trip before Ewar hops out ahead of him.

"Himself'll already be in the library," Ewar says, polite, "just follow me on."

Going into the castle (a bustling place, busy) is not really like going into most any other, if only because this (unlike most you'll find in the mountains) is immediately warm. The most obvious of Valdis's numerous enchantments is the lighting; fire burning brightly in what looks like glass torches set into each wall.

As surprised no one in the entire universe - this or any other - Henry is somewhat immediately halted by the lamps. He actually stops, physically, although presumably it is not long before Ewar notices this and gently prods, or whatever, because he is used to academic weirdos.

Henry is used to like, 21st century technology and as such notes the absence of cold much less than he would if it was as drafty as a castle ought to be. Although he has spent some time in Britain, and you can't swing your arms without hitting a castle there, so he has visited at least one. (It was the Tower of London, ftlog; that does not count.)

The number of academic weirdos in Ewar's life went up when Martel entered it and has since continued to rise - he has, in turn, proceeded to get really, really good at handling them. Gently hurrying them along is but one of the many services he offers! Some of the rest involve things like 'kicking Martel out of his office when he's been in there for 78 hours straight'.

It's possible he takes the most boring route he can think of to the library on purpose, but one way or another they reach the double doors that make the main entrance and Ewar, with great respect for his lord, knocks out of habit and pauses, waiting, before he opens the doors and leans in. "Got him," he hollers ... and then checks himself and adds, "my Lord," innocently.

(Ewar knows when he can and cannot get away with these things.)

"Louder, Ewar," Martel suggests blandly, coming downstairs from the library's upper level, "I don't think they heard you in Osthos. I'll take Henry back later myself - go and find something useful to do." He considers adding that making calf eyes at Eirene isn't useful, but blessedly refrains as the swordmaster makes his timely retreat and closes the library doors.

"Welcome to my humble abode," he greets Henry, only a little bit dry, "as this might as well be for as often as I've fallen asleep in it."

The library itself is well worth the pride he takes in it; the collection is multidimensional, with the primary languages being English, Elenic, Latin and Spanish; besides the expected variety of tables between bookshelves, there's a series of fireplaces and armchairs along the walls, and the centerpiece of the room is the staircase to the upper level (where the books that require cases that lock belong, and a few things he just prefers to keep out of sight). It's surprisingly cosy for how huge it is, but maybe that's not as surprising when one considers...Martel.

"I assume you mean humble in the pejorative - and ironic - sense," responds his guest, faintly. There is a particular look he gets around knowledge in the rawest sense, and it is largely the reason Hyde voraciously and indiscriminately consumes words and ideas as he does; Jekyll has focused all his brainpower in one area, but he really does love any kind of learning.

He is fairly certain Martel will not mind if he just kind of looks, absorbing all of it. Something about his stance suggests he is considering walking in about four directions at once, because decisions are hard.

"I never really mastered it any other way," Martel concedes without a hint of shame (at least he recognizes that he's an arrogant son of a bitch) as he stops at the bottom of the stairs, simultaneously given to entrances and indeed not minding at all the fact that his surroundings have thoroughly upstaged him. Considering how much personal effort was involved in them, he'll just bask in reflected glory.

"Some of the alphabets you won't recognize," he notes, observing Henry's reaction with a certain degree of satisfaction, "though I'm making a project out of translating the Elene history section." All of it, yes; it'll probably take him decades, especially considering how much else he has going on at any given moment, but that's the thing about being functionally immortal. You have so much more time.

Henry senses when he is being smugged at; back in the days when he was first working at BU and hadn't learned how to hide his reaction to the insane pointless opulence in which the majority of his colleagues flourished. They'd look at him like they expected something, and he didn't know how to tell them he was just aghast that anyone could spend so much money on, say, a carpet.

This is functional, however, and markedly different. He doesn't mind letting the fact that he's awed show through. "And that's your history, isn't it?"

(It is a reasonably good guess; he's just not positive on the place name.)

Valdis is beautiful - and a comfortably-appointed home, where one day he and Candice will raise their children - but above all the estate is designed and built to work. It revolves around classrooms and practise fields, this library and the smaller ones that act as satellites around the castle, the private studies that he locks everyone else out of. It's exhausting. It's wonderful. And he is proud of it, because he did this.

"Mine are all the titles prefaced with 'military'," he says, speaking of work. While this is a fascinating way of putting it, it is also a confirmation. "It's Elenia, though, yes." He's been compiling a family history (partly from memory, partly from research), and he doesn't mention it for so very many reasons. (First of all 'it's irrelevant', which saves him from having to look at any of the others.)

"A lot of that deals with the rise of the knighthoods, and that'd bring us all the way back to where academia and war occasionally go hand in hand - or at least take the odd intellectual to the front lines. Cannon-fodder don't make very good sorcerers."

Martel is, interestingly, a student of the world the same way Henry is a student of the body - having learnt so many of its intimacies one can now shape without, the other within. It is probably also interesting to note how much fucking trouble it's already gotten one of them and is about to get the other. Knowledge is what keeps both of them going (love is knowledge too, of a kind) but at its purest level it is dangerous.

Or maybe it's just dangerous because both of these men also exhibit a particular kind of arrogance. Henry's is much ...weirder, because he's so self-effacing in general, but not about his work. For this reason Martel should really point out that he did all this; Henry would love it.

"It sounds like as an ideal it's meant to encourage balance. Is that how it usually goes?"

The physical v. the intellectual, if you will.

"In a manner of speaking, balance is at the heart of everything they do-" speaking of knowledge and love and the physical vs the intellectual, Martel is so careful to separate himself (but when he's not thinking about it he always says we), "-as they walk a very particular knife edge. The same thing as is taught to the premier warriors of Eosia to protect the faithful and serve the king is what Styrics - especially Styric women - are persecuted for by those very same faithful. The church seeks converts among the people who have helped to mold the fighting force that's allowed them the influence to do so."

...sometimes he does this, the monologuing. After a beat, he catches himself and shrugs, close to artless. "In Arum they fight for gold, not for gods, and there's nothing especially mystical about it. Since I came here - a year or so ago, after I died - and began work on the castle and the training school, I've been adapting Pandion methods to better suit the needs of my students. It's not entirely without irony, I think, putting myself more or less in the position of my former Preceptor."

('After I died'.)

"I have no doubt he'd understand why the library was the first thing I went to work on, my unfulfilled desire for his job aside."

"We've had that here; I don't know how much you know about American history?" Henry is not really going to like, go into details about Salem if he can help it, and his knowledge is fairly fuzzy anyway, but he has some interesting views on the intersection of faith and virtually anything else in life. "Or--world history, really. Religion and power are a combination we seem to fall into repeatedly."

....after you died, really, Martel. This little thread of information has the useful effect of diluting what might actually be Henry's inclination to wander away into how he has much of his many issues because of the intersection of science and faith! Exactly how much should he consider it ethical to mess with, if human life is created by a divine force? These attitudes were certainly more prevalent in the Victorian era, but they have not gone away, and people are still willing to kill one another over them.

But never mind. Never mind. "...you'll forgive me if I'm skeptical of your nonchalance."

AFTER YOU DIED, CASUAL GUY.

Edited 2009-10-03 19:34 (UTC)

"Religious wars are always popular," says the jaded former knight who fought in a few, sometimes for his faith and in the end for profit and vengeance. "I'm becoming more familiar with your world history - the closest comparison to the church I grew up in is your Catholic one. We even had something somewhat similar to the Crusades."

Rendor is hot, dry and full of madmen if you ask Martel - he doesn't really have fond memories of the place. It was beautiful, and he has opinions about conversion by the sword (it's stupid), but he doesn't think of it affectionately. At least he's hundreds of years too young to have fought in the earliest wars there, the ones he compares to the Crusades.

"But, yes, speaking of religious wars. In the shortest version, I led the wrong side of one and my brother killed me to end it." Henry is...correct to doubt his nonchalance, because he's really not; it's just that he can't pretend it didn't happen, and it's so much easier than feeling it every time.

(He knows it's only in his mind, but his chest aches.)

"It's an interesting position to know, with your own hands, that the gods exist - and then to lose your faith. The knowledge remains."

"It must be," Jekyll demurs at first, looking at the endless rows of books rather than Martel. He is only so equipped to handle this, introduced somewhat abruptly to more things in heaven and earth by himself, by whatever force makes a monster of him, and so he can accept certain ideas under the umbrella of science that perhaps once he could not.

But death in what appears to be fairly obvious impermanence is still somewhat daunting - dead is dead, and the weak shadow of Sunday School absent watchmaker faith he had as a child even more so. "I've considered that if I were to ever be confronted with incontrovertible proof of the divine it would- be ruinous. If we are simply the sum of years and years of the refinement of parts, then I can accept that we are none of us perfect, and strive toward the fulfillment of potential too far off in the future for me to see."

It seems like a worthy goal, the horizon. "But if there is a greater consciousness, especially one which is supposed to be magnanimous, loving- then everything I have done becomes- remarkably pointless."

"Gods are more than men are capable of understanding," Martel says, and there's an odd note in it, a wrong note, like he had to learn that lesson the hardest way and it broke parts of him (because he did, and it did). "Above all what we do is strive for betterment of one kind or another - there's nothing pointless in that, whether your god gives a damn about you or not."

...that's the bitterness of someone who knows from having the divine ripped out of him that his God doesn't want him any more. He doesn't wallow in it, and it's out of sight again smoothly, but- it was there. And it hurt more than dying.

"Deities aren't truly perfect, either...just so much more." After a beat, he shrugs, and swaps religious ache out for dry, deprecating wit: "Personally, if they want to play another merry game of pass the parcel, I'm otherwise engaged. But it's been useful - and necessary to my own health - to grasp the interaction of the mortal and the divine as best anyone can."

It's an educated opinion, if not any more perfect than anything else.

"Nothing is beyond my understanding," he returns, faint, aware of the ridiculous overarching hubris of it, only half serious, but- that half is damn serious.

If there was ever a ladder to God, if the one in Henry's world wasn't beyond mortal ken by virtue of being gone, Henry Jekyll would climb it just to ask what was the point of the ability to think in the first place if it was just going to be fragmented and destroyed, what kind of cruelty was that, who could conceive of such a thing?

He'd have to wait in line, of course, but he could be patient. "It seems to have worked for you on some levels, though; I would say you look remarkably healthy for a corpse."

So they're going to be witty, it appears.

The look that crosses Martel's face - mostly in the eyes, and the lines there that he doesn't have any more and never will again - is very faint, but all the same the best description of it is 'affectionately pitying'. He doesn't argue the point, knowing full damn well that some lessons can only be taught by your own mistakes. (He wouldn't have listened. He didn't listen.)

It passes.

"You should see the scar," he says, dryly - and actually he'd be perfectly willing to show him, but it's not a little bit weird to casually get half-naked with new friends. (Unless it's for the purposes of a back massage, and anyway, they ended up married. Henry is no Candice, which is probably something you never thought you'd have to read.) "The nexus is...interesting that way, though. I wouldn't be here at all if not for it, and as it is I am...not the same as I was. It's what I've devoted the most substantial of my research to, this past year. That and the torches."

Henry really only half-catches the look, but - yes, he mostly discards it, without spite but without really thinking about it either. He has seen it before, and it's always from people who mean well; it's just never been from a person who really knows what they're talking about before. Usually that look is tantamount to 'Oh, darling overworked Henry, why don't you go out and live a little, for a change.'

Inevitably everyone else's concept of 'living' fails to match his; in some ways this means he's just different, the way he always has been, but it some ways it points to the time he told Hasi he felt like he'd lived his whole life half asleep.

Martel is different too, of course, maybe not in all the same ways, but enough that Henry can grab something immediately: "The torches are ingenious, by the way. The form and function in tandem alone- I think your assistant was about to pull me along by the collar if I didn't take my head out of the childlke wonder."

...look he doesn't know what to call Ewar.

"Swordmaster, he's under the impression I hired him as a heavily armed nursemaid," he supplies (dryly, fondly), but he's already smiling - he's not going to pretend not to be outrageously proud of that particular accomplishment, after the time and effort that went into it. "The torches were one of my earlier ideas for the castle - the first of my forays into stealing innovations of the modern era and recreating them myself."

The fact he got to light things on fire for weeks on end made it one of his favourites, too, although the accomplishment all by itself would've been more than enough. As is obvious, from how easily he's sidetracked onto this topic. A gentle breeze could persuade Martel to talk about the work he loves.

Henry grins, delighted the way brilliant people are by others of similar accomplishment and intrinsic potential, an assessment not even particularly egotistical in this case; the most exigent reason he is shaken to the core by the thought of losing his mind is that he thinks about his genius as approximately as often as he thinks how it's really nice to have say...opposable thumbs- grateful when it occurs to him, but not occurring often. "What sort of energy do they take?"

Since, you know, environmental issues are a thing. "I don't know if the sort of thing you have to worry about here, but where I'm from we're beginning to realize we might burn out the planet if we aren't careful. In our own lifetimes, perhaps."

Edited 2009-10-13 15:21 (UTC)

The laugh here is sort of self-deprecating, and that'll hopefully make a little more sense when he answers (or maybe it won't! who knows, he has problems): "We should be all right, at least in Valdis; it's my own, mostly, supplemented by the stroppy little thief I worship." This really is how he talks about his goddess, she must just love that.

"I think the phrase is, ah, 'master switch'? I am that, in effect. Thus far I've managed not to startle myself into lighting up the entire place at once."

(Not by accident, anyway; he did play with his new creation just to see how versatile he'd managed to make it. Very, as it turned out! Everyone's very glad he's stopped messing with the lighting unnecessarily.)

Edited 2009-10-13 15:47 (UTC)

The concept of depending on a deity for- well, for virtually anything,- is one Henry finds deeply uncomfortable, and there are reasons for that (there's always a reason for everything somewhere inside); it has been said the fathers are the first model for God, and if your father abandons you, what does that say about God?

...well, it says that Henry has daddy issues, probably. But most of this doesn't show on this face, and what is is quickly overtaken by curiosity. "Does it require constant thought, like keeping oneself smiling by virtue of deliberately lifting the corners of the mouth?"

The comparison to an emotional lie is telling, perhaps. "Or is it unconscious like breath- or somewhere between?"

"Yes, like breathing," Martel confirms, with an expression that suggests (accurately) that he's pleased by how Henry grasps this. "I could hold my breath, but it'd be dreadfully inconvenient for the people using my lights. More often than not a spell can be crafted and set into place without the need for my constant attention - all of the enchantments on the castle itself are like this, it'd be inconvenient otherwise. I'm not a god, personally, there's a limit to how much I can be thinking of at one time."

The implication being that gods are not so limited - Aphrael, herself, doesn't always understand that humans are.

"I wanted these," he gestures to the torches that they're discussing casually, "to be as easy for others to use as your funny little lightswitches-" I'm sorry, Henry, he's like this, "-but I was honestly making it up as I went along just to see if I could. I started with something I could use, and then took it further. You could use them, if you were taught the commands. Think of it like the sort of lights that you clap on and off."

"Commands." He says it not like a question, but like an idea, a concept he's unraveling in the labyrinthine network of his mind, twisting it and turning it over and pulling it apart. It's notable that he treats information the same way Hyde treats people, something to be absorbed and consumed and made his own, the correlation therein elementary.

The human brain is capable of holding as many as seven conscious thoughts at once, but beyond that something slips down to a place of lower priority; the statistic exists, of course, but ascertaining whether or not it's really true is about as easy as proving that any two people so much as see the color green the same way. Henry wonders if somewhere Martel is always thinking lights and somewhere else all these other small miracles, because ...he really loves human biology, all right, he's not doing what he is entirely out of misspent guilt. "How much trouble would it be to teach me?"

This seems like a really good idea.

This gives Martel a moment's pause, and he considers Henry. "None whatsoever; here for the lighting, they're no more independently mystical than the lightswitch that inspired them. It's a different mechanism, powered through myself and my little goddess, but made to behave in a similar way. These are all keyed to respond to an archaic Elenic dialect that I chose."

The second pause is a more natural one, where he runs out of words briefly and stops where the stopping is good while he decides how to go on. "Teaching you what I do would be very different. The first part is fluency in Styric - one has to be able to think in that language - and it's a ridiculous language. Beautiful, but a bloody nuisance. A proficient enough student in the language and the secrets themselves could passably master it in a decade or so."

Martel ... was better than that, always, immediately, but he's not talking about himself or rightly Henry, either, he's talking about the average student. Not all Pandions are created equal; there are knights who can barely make Aphrael hear them at all. (Kalten's really bad at it. For the record.)

"And it is, in the end, a very intimate relationship with a deity. For political reasons we're not ought to discuss that, but those haven't applied to me for a long time."

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[log] we talked about the subjectivity of morals

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