[log] we talked about the subjectivity of morals

[apostatised]

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.)

Comments

[errantknights.livejournal.com]

"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.

[beingtwofold.livejournal.com]

"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.

[errantknights.livejournal.com]

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."

[beingtwofold.livejournal.com]

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.

[errantknights.livejournal.com]

"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.

[beingtwofold.livejournal.com]

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."

[errantknights.livejournal.com]

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.)

[beingtwofold.livejournal.com]

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?"

[errantknights.livejournal.com]

"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."

[beingtwofold.livejournal.com]

"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.

[errantknights.livejournal.com]

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."