Sturgesia

Here’s a snippet from one of the many, many dialogues of Alpaurle, arguably the greatest thaumatist of the Rauane Envendun-e (the Age of Purest Silver, which is to say, a really long time ago). There is no argument, however, that he is the most influential. His Conversations with the Hight Priest of Ulet have little thaumatical value, but philosophers tend to gravitate to the work, and it is typically one of the first works they teach to beginning students. Here’s a snippet from conversation six, which is primarily about virtue. It serves as the epigram for chapter twenty-six:

Alpaurle: Let us speak, then, of the good man. How do we determine which is the good man?

The High Priest: That is easy. He is the one who thinks and acts virtuously, and avoids sin.

Alpaurle: And how do we know which thoughts and actions are virtuous, and which are sinful?

The High Priest: Is the distinction not obvious?

Alpaurle: It is not obvious to me, but then, very little is.

As you can see Alpaurle’s style is reminiscent of one of our own philosophers. But it’s not Alpaurle I want to talk about; it’s Feven IV of the City Emerald, who translated the work from Old Court to modern High Fae, and edited it down from its astonishing length of twenty thousand pages into a somewhat more manageable six thousand.

Feven was an interesting character, a philosopher in his own right, best remembered for his proof that free will is an illusion, as is the conscious mind (the proof is strangely impervious to logical refutation). It was not until late in life that his obsession with Conversations with the High Priest of Ulet began. What made his interest unusual was that he for most of his career he’d openly disparaged Alpaurle’s philosophical works, calling them “mental self-pleasure” and “works whose value comes not from their content but from the fame of the man who penned them.” In one pamphlet, he’d even argued that the Conversations were a late forgery, and had not been written by Alpaurle at all.

So you can imagine his contemporaries surprise when abandoned his post as the Dean of Philosophy at the Universety Nyelcu in order to pursue his newfound obsession. (It is worth noting that technically he was not truly a Feven when the work was published, since Feven is a title and not a name, and he gave up the title when he left the university. The book was actually published with his given name, Tereca Mas, as the editor, but the honorific was restored after is death.) When asked what had changed, he answered that Alpaurle had appeared in his bedchamber one night, claiming to be a projection from the past, and if Feven didn’t believe him, he should look it up in Alpaurle’s Memoirs, volume six. When Feven retrieved the autobiography from the University library (so the story goes), he discovered a curious note: “Visited the future, spoke to a self-important boob. Told him to edit those damnable dialogs for future generations, which almost certainly have shorter attention spans.” The entry has always been there; you can look it up yourself if you like. That Feven VI was truly the “self-important boob” in question is a mystery, but the conversation whether real or imagined had the desired effect.

Feven VI died three days after completing what had become his life’s work. His last words were, “I think the High Priest had that bastard dead to rights.”

Here we have another “DVD Extra” from the new novel, The Office of Shadow, this time concerning Lord Gray. This epigram is from Chapter Thirty-Two, taken from Lord Grays Recollections:

Lord Valen once asked me how I defined true friendship. I told him that a true friend is one who forgives any indiscretion. I thought it a particularly fine thing to say, as I was having an affair with his wife at the time.

Prior to the publication of his Recollections, Lord Gray was already a notorious figure. He was a womanizer, who claimed to have “fathered more bastards than any Fae living.” He attained his lordship after accusing his brother of treason (it turned out that his brother was in fact a traitor, but not for the reasons that Gray had alleged, all of which were pure fabrications.

Known for being querulous, misanthropic, and deliberately unkind, Lord Gray achieved a questionable fame when he published his Recollections. Believing that he was near death, he crafted a memoir that also served as an open poison-pen letter to everyone he hated, which number was revealed to be quite large.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), Lord Gray fully recovered from his illness and lived for another forty years after the release of the Recollections. His revelations and opinions proved explosive, especially his long list of purported romantic conquests, which included a number of ladies at court. He was ultimately dragged before the Queen for sedition; he’d devoted an entire chapter to criticisms of Titania, expressing blunt opinions about her policies, her manners, and even her taste in clothing. He was sentenced to live out the remainder of his life at the prison of Crere Sulace.

Regardless of the outcome, Gray claimed that he regretted nothing, and when his cell was cleaned out after his death, the guards found an unfinished sequel to the Recollections, even more vitriolic and inflammatory than the original. The warden of Crere Sulace, Crenyllice, had the book burned “for the good of the realm,” though a guard who perused the book prior to its destruction maintained that a good deal of it was devoted to crimes and misdemeanors committed by the warden himself.

Interestingly, Recollections inspired a brief flurry of satirical imitations, known as “backhanded wisdom,” owing to Gray’s peculiar genius at dispensing uniquely terrible advice.