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.

In anticipation of the June 3 release of my second novel The Office of Shadow, I thought it would be fun to provide some background material for the book.

Each chapter begins with an epigram, taken from a variety of sources in the Fae world. Many are taken from Travels at Home and Abroad by one Stil-Eret. Here’s the epigram from Chapter one, taken from his essay “Light in Annwn.” Below it is a brief essay about Stil-Eret, and the manner in which his Travels were compiled.

The sun in Annwn perches eternally on the horizon, swimming in lazy circles that allow it to fully rise for only three hours each day. Never lighter than morning nor darker than dusk, Annwn exists in perpetual transition — always arriving, never arrived.

Annwn was discovered by the Fae long ago and was, for many centuries, a bastion of the pure Elvish folk. But it was later discovered by men from the Nymaen world, those called human, and conquered by them. Over time the two races mingled, and have now become one. Nei- ther Fae nor Nymaen, they are simply Annwni, with some of the qualities of each.

There are many villages in Annwn, but only one city, named Blood of Arawn.The city is built upon seven great ramparts of earth and stone dug out of the otherwise flat grasslands of that world.The oldest buildings of that city—the coliseum, the Penn’s villa, the temples—are built of marble, but many of these structures have since crumbled and have been replaced with more modest structures of brick. Only the obelisk at the center of the great market, called Romwll’s Needle, remains unblem- ished after fifteen centuries. Conventional wisdom holds that a pair of thaumaturges sit in a stone room beneath the obelisk, whispering bindings without cease, for it is believed that if the needle were ever to fall, then Blood of Arawn would fall soon after, and all of Annwn crumble
into dust.

Stil-Eret has become known as the first travel writer, and possibly still the best, even three hundred years after his death. He became renowned, but only posthumously. He began his career as a servant, a steward in the employ of the Secretary of States, Lord Amil Nybera. Though a commoner, Still Eret had been taught to read and write by the Arcadian priestess in his village, and he might have gone to University had his parents been able to afford it.

It became Stil-Eret’s practice to take detailed notes of his surroundings during his travels with Lord Nybera. He recorded not just the sights and sounds of these distant lands, but also the smells, the tactile sensations, and the emotions that welled up in him. These diaries were deeply personal, and it never would have occurred to him to publish them, had it not been for a chance meeting with an invalid girl.

Sinsi Alweth was the daughter of a wealthy merchant named Granwell Alweth, who had amassed a great fortune early in life, and spent his early retirement entertaining guests as noble as would deign to attend. It was during one of these fetes that Stil-Eret first encountered Sinsi; he stumbled on her quite by accident in a courtyard in her father’s house. It was a cool evening and Stil-Eret had come outside to take in the night air. She was lying in a wheeled bed, staring up at the stars, the fingers of her right hand trailing in the waters of a fountain. She had no feeling in her body below her neck save for those fingers.

Taking pity on the poor lonely girl, Still Eret took out his journal and began reading to her of his travels. He described the wind-whirled grasses of Annwn, the water dances of Mag Mell, and the curious frisson one felt when traveling through the locks. She was entranced.

When the hour had grown late, Sinsi’s nurse demanded that Stil-Eret leave so the girl could return to her rooms. Sinse begged Stil-Eret to return, and whether it was the starlight in the girl’s eyes or the simple satisfaction of being wanted, Stil Eret found himself counting the hours. He returned the next night and the night after, and gladly, for he quickly began to find Sinsi’s company as enthralling as she found his. He read to her for twelve nights, until finally his journal was at and end.

“I want to hear more,” she said, running the tips of her fingers over Stil-Eret’s arm. “I want to taste the salt in the air at Hawthorne by the sea, stand on the great steps in Estacana, feel the mud between my toes in the swamps of the Gnomics.”

“Would that I could,” said Stil-Eret, “but I go only where my master goes.”

The next day, Granwell Aleth came to Stil-Eret at his home. Sinsi was dying, he told Stil-Eret, of the wasting sickness that was so prevalent in those days. But he believed that Stil-Eret’s stories had given the girl a new lease on life; her cheeks were redder, her eyes brighter. He’d begun to believe that she might actually recover. He offered pay Stil-Eret’s expenses to travel wherever his daughter wished, on the condition that Still Eret would return and beguile Sensi with the tales of his voyages. Stil-Eret was loathe to leave the girl, but the world called to him, and he pledged to do just as Granwell Aleth asked.

And so Stil-Eret left his position with the Secretary of States and lit out for lands near and far, visiting places that no other in the City Emerald had seen in centuries, if ever. He stood on the balconies at the Locks of Mab’s Glorious Union. He sailed to the Eastern Isles and swam with whales. He journeyed farther south into the Gnomics than any Fae before or since, and sailed to the center of the Lake of Tears. And after every trip, he returned to the home of Granwell Aleth and regaled Sinsi with his words, so evocative and detailed that the girl felt as though she had been transported, allowed to leave not just her bed, but the boundaries of Seelie experience.

After his third trip, he pledged his troth to her. After his fifth, they were wed. Their marriage was never consummated in a physical sense, but perhaps their love was all the purer for it.

It was during his sixth journey, to the Nymaen world, that she finally succumbed to her illness, despite Stel-Eret’s and her father’s best efforts. Upon his return, Stil-Eret was heartbroken. He never unpacked his chest, but left the city the next morning, traveling West, never to be seen again.

After five years had past, and Granwell Aleth reached the conclusion that Stil-Eret was either dead or missing forever, the merchant compiled Stil-Eret’s writings and published them as Travels at Home and Abroad, with a lengthy dedication to his daughter. The book did poorly; fewer than two hundred copies were ever sold. The Fae are a notoriously parochial and incurious race.

Sadly, not a single copy of the Travels remains. In fact, Stil-Eret might have been forgotten entirely had it not been for the court poet Everide, who decades later chanced upon a copy of the book in Titania’s library, and learned the story of its publication from Aleth’s grandson. From this, Everide composed the Romance of Sinsi and the Traveler, which was a modest success in its day. It was not until a century later that scholars began to realize the importance of what Everide had preserved.

The only remnants we have today of Stil-Eret are the excerpts that Everide quotes (at length, happily) within the text of his romance. Further, Everide was more interested in poetry than precision, so it is not known how much of Stil-Eret’s original text has been modified for the sake of literature. Yet despite these impediments, modern scholars recognize the remaining fragments of the Travels as one of the great works of Fae letters, and many of his journeys have never been duplicated.