[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]

"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."