“Assume people know what they’re doing” is often a pretty poor heuristic, but I didn’t really have much of a choice as far as meditation went. The instructions I’d been given were vague, describing the pillar and saying that I should keep it in mind for the duration. Because that was all I’d been instructed […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 153: The Temple
Long ago, the Li’o’te Temple had been buried by people who had wanted to put an end to still magic and couldn’t get around the temple’s inviolability. When the still mages had recovered the temple, they had left it where it was, deep underground, and done little more than excavating down to it, largely because […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 152: The Time to Talk
There was a hiccup in the Demon-Blooded Festival, right at the last second: apparently the prisoner that they were going to execute escaped from custody shortly after what I can only assume was an absolute farce of a trial. The committee decided to instead use an entad, helpfully donated by Oberlin, but everyone was well […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 151: The Mind’s Eye
Arthur had always been a fan of pointing out time compression in media, wherever he saw it. There was a part in The Dark Knight Rises, Batman escapes from this big pit somewhere in either India or Morocco, and then has to travel back to Gotham City. He probably has enough time to do this, […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 150: Than One Innocent Suffer
The sun had gone down while we ate dinner, but Li’o seemed no less busy, and the temperature hadn’t seemed to move all that much, thanks to a warm wind that was blowing through the streets. Amaryllis and I had talked to the lawyers earlier in the day, enough to get a sense of what […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 149: I Have to Hand it to You
Dinner went … okay. There were questions and answers, but we avoided talking about some of the bigger stuff, like the narrative, and the exact nature of Uther Penndraig. How Reimer hadn’t made the connection to Arthur … well, he’d grown up his whole life knowing about Uther Penndraig, the mythical figure who had done […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 148: Sing For Your Supper
We sat around the big table together, with everyone assembled. Dinner was coming, and I was stressing about that, but we had a few hours to kill until Lisi and Reimer showed up, and that meant that it was time to debrief. Hopefully, I would get some information out of our elders. “I have nothing,” […]