“Practice,” Hart said. “It’s not like they had an elemental affinity for water, but you have to sail out of sight of shore to learn how to sail out of sight of shore. The fact that their sailors were all warriors helped, too. Then as now, one of the main hazards of sea travel was monster attack. I’m sure Fenwick knows something about that.”

“Oh, yes,” Fenwick said. “The fight scene against sea monsters was an almost obligatory part of Thylean epics, even ones that only tangentially involved ocean travel. The Thyleans are known to have fought particularly vicious battles against a tribe of creatures called ‘sea-devils’ or ‘sea-wolves’, which are thought to refer to a type of shark person that may have actually been battled to the point of extinction. The oral record shows at the very least a clear decline. In the earliest tales, the sea-devils would come ashore in massive waves and have to be fought off. Later, they are limited to ‘bedeviling’ ships.”

“So why were they more willing to go out there in the first place?” the original questioner asked. “I mean, if it was so dangerous and they didn’t start out any better sailors.”

“Well, part of it was having a culture that put a premium on bravery and individual achievement,” Hart said. “Great deeds were pretty much money in the bank, and if you wanted to do something that no one in your clan had ever done before, your options were pretty limited. Sailing somewhere new was one way that didn’t depend on local dragon populations. Sometimes it wasn’t a matter of choice… a lot of Thylean explorers were exiles, outlaws… being beyond the protection of society gave you a strong incentive to go somewhere that nobody you knew had ever heard of.”

“Professor Hart… um, I mean, Aaron,” a girl said. “I found it interesting when you were talking about the relations between the old empire and the Thyleans that you mentioned they were both white. Is that actually significant?”

“Extremely,” Hart said. “Humans… white humans… have a bad history when it comes to relating to humans of other colors as humans. See? I’m doing it right now. I tend to think of my field of expertise as being ‘human history’, but it’s the history of the human people from the part of the world where white people were best established in the days before halfway reliable global travel was a possibility.”

“I just… it seems racist,” the girl said.

“It is incredibly racist,” Hart said. “Both the tendency I’m talking about, and the way the humans from the Mother Isles ended up relating to the Thyleans as opposed to how they treated the Argenti, or others.”

“It sounds like you’re admitting that you’re racist,” she said.

“Well, I hate to put it that baldly,” Hart said. “And everybody does, which is why we usually end up changing the subject. Which I’m going to do in a few minutes here, but I’ll come back to that. But… yeah. I said the word ‘humans’ and I meant ‘specifically the humans who look like me, share a cultural background with me, and will look the most ‘normal’ to most anyone in a position of authority over me‘. Do you have a better word for that than ‘racist’?”

“How about ‘human’?” Fenwick suggested. “It seems like you’re being a bit hard on yourself, to be quite honest.”

“See, you’re doing it, too,” Hart said. “I’m not being ‘hard on’ myself, Fenwick, I’m simply turning the same kind of critical eye I’d use to appraise the actions of people in some foreign culture at some past age on my own actions, as a member of this culture. How can I examine the mindset of the Old Imperial Man from the Mother Isles hundreds of years ago if I’m going to flinch away from performing the same kind of the mind of his closest living relative on hand, the Modern Magisterian Man?”

“I just don’t think it helps anything to try to make everything about race,” the girl who’d asked the question said. “I try not to see color.”

“Well, then you picked a great university to come to, though really you were sort of spoiled for choices,” Hart said. “Look around the room. Look around the campus. ‘Not seeing color’ isn’t much of an accomplishment when you’re going to college in Palesville, the capital of Greater Chalkwhitonia.”

“It’s funny you say that, because I actually have an Argenti-Imperial suitemate,” she said.

“I’m surprised you noticed,” Hart said.

“I don’t treat her any differently than anyone else,” she said.

“How many times a day do you bring up your other suitemates as examples in conversation?” Hart asked.

“I would if an applicable subject ever came up,” she said. “It’s not racist that there’s something different about her.”

“Right, but if we talk about how that difference might make her experiences going through life different from… or more difficult than… yours,” Hart said, “then coins-to-crullers someone is going to pop up and say, ‘Why make this about race? I don’t even see color.’”

“I just wanted to know what whiteness had to do with it,” she said. “How can we say that if everything else had been the same but they had been black, or brown, or whatever, that things wouldn’t have gone exactly the same?”

“Well, first of all, as I’m one-eighth whatever on my mother’s side, I thank you for that little gesture of inclusiveness,” Hart said. “And you mean hypothetically? We can talk about this as a hypothetical, if you want. We have that luxury. To the people of the Argentus, or many points east and south, it’s less an abstract historical ‘what if?’ to be mooted about and more a little thing called ‘history’, also known as ‘ongoing reality’.

“But let’s try to answer your question, all the same. Was it significant? Yes. It meant that the Metro folk could see themselves in the Thyleans’ shoes, in their skins, and vice-versa. It meant that when a Thylean settlement sprung up on their shores, then after the initial unsettled period where everything is axes and pitchforks the newcomers could be almost seamlessly integrated, treated as not much more different than any other settlement. It means they could look at a Thylean infant and think, ‘That could be son. That could be my grandson.’ These things matter. As far as we know, nobody from the Argentus sailed to the Mother Isles and set up a colony, but if they had done so they’d be a lot more visible than Thylean settlers were. You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think that matters.

“I mean, look at this: the stories, the lore we got from Thylean sources… they became accepted as parts of our culture. The oldest known Pax-language epic poems are about Thylean heroes in Thylean lands. We don’t erase that identity from them, and we don’t treat the poetic cycles as exotic and foreign. That’s not at all how we treat stories from other human cultures, but in this case it just passes without comment. You won’t find these poems or their adaptations shelved away from everything else in special ‘Thylean Interest’ sections. We don’t think of ourselves as Thyleans, or as Thyleans as us… but in how we interact with them, they’re treated as less foreign than native-born citizens of our own Imperium whose ancestors came here by way of the Argentus Archipelago.

“Now I mentioned changing the subject. To be perfectly honest, I don’t feel qualified to lead a discussion about the intricacies of endoracism and exoracism. Certainly not off the cuff. And it’s not actually the topic we chose for the day, by which I mean all of us. This is your class and If you all want to talk about it on a future day, we’ll talk about it, but be warned: as long as I’m here, it’s not going to be a feel-good circle-j… back-patting session where we all come out agreeing that Racism Is Baaaaad Thank Khersis It’s Over. Just bear that in mind.”

“Well… that was, ah, ah invigorating if perhaps overly passionate beginning,” Fenwick said. “Didn’t one of us mention that this isn’t a lecture course?”

“That wasn’t a lecture, it was a rant,” Hart sad. “Just as a point of order. But, let’s move on. Who’s got a question, or a topic?”

A few hands went up around the room. I kept mine down. I knew I’d need to participate to get a good grade, but the things that were popping up in my head all had to do with the off-the-table-for-now topic of racism.

“You’ve got something?” Hart asked a student who had his hand up.

“Yeah, the thing that really throws me is when you talk about trading,” he said. “Okay, I get that not every Thylean was a big burly barbarian warrior, even back in the day, but who was doing the trading? The little guys? The women?”

“Well, mainly, the big burly barbarian warriors,” Hart said. “Striking out to sea was a risky business.”

“But who did they even trade with?” someone asked. “I mean, was it all internal… they’d go steal a boatload of goods and then take their loot back home and sell it to someone who stole a boatload of money? Or would they steal stuff and then turn around and sell it to the people they took it from?”

“They’d have to sell it on credit if they did. Anyway, there’s a saying I just invented that might explain things,” Hart said. “The difference between a pirate ship and a merchant ship is the contents of the hold.”

“That’s actually more or less the moral of a certain ancient tale, though not precisely word for word,” Fenwick said. “It’s very difficult to come up with a sentiment that has not been expressed somewhere in the annals of lore.”

“Fascinating,” Hart said. “So, anyway, you’re out sailing and you come across someone that has something of value, they’re strangers and foreigners and basically nothing to you… you have an empty hold and more fighters than they do. What happens? You wind up with a full hold. Then you run into someone who has something valuable you want and need… you could take it by force, but that’s risky and you don’t have anywhere to put it. So what do you do? You take something bulky that’s not worth your time to haul back across the sea and you trade it away. Or you just flat out sell that stuff for coin, which is valuable anywhere and takes up almost no room.

“When I put it that way it sounds really haphazard, like Thylean sailors just set out at random and plunder happened. That’s not the case. But when you set out to sail up and down the coastline of a distant land with the intention of coming back with the most return for your risk, you’re going to run into a couple of factors. One is that you can fill up your boat with the contents of a single big raid. Two is that the ‘prime loot’… the gold, the really rare furs, the magic items, the finely worked goods… are going to be a small percentage of your take. So you’re either making the ocean voyage twice for a relatively small haul, or you’re throwing out a lot of what you find and fighting every step of the way, or you’re being canny about it and trading the bulky and useful but not terribly precious things for more smaller and more valuable items.”

“And people would just trade with them?” the guy who’d asked the question asked. “They’d see the Thylean ship and not just attack it on sight, or run away?”

“Well, to a certain point, anyone who came from across the seas was dangerous,” Hart said. “The Thyleans were feared, but it’s not like their sails were the only ones that caused apprehension. But at the same time… the ‘us’ in ‘us vs. them’ was necessarily smaller, back in the day. Each little tribe or enclave was more or less on its own. So if the raiders had pillaged up and down the coast but they stop at your place to trade, you don’t necessarily know what they’ve been up to, and if you do, you don’t necessarily care. It’s not your countrymen living fifteen, twenty miles down the coast. It’s not your neighbors. You aren’t more connected to the people on the next island over than you are to these people who came from hundreds of miles away.”

“I think I’d just be glad they wanted to trade instead of fight,” a girl said. “Even if I had to know that they were selling stolen goods.”

“I’m not sure the concept of stolen goods would even apply,” another student said. “I mean, yeah, it was stolen and that’s wrong… but like P… Aaron said, you see someone with something you want and you’re stronger than them? The people fifteen miles down the coast weren’t just ‘not your countrymen’, they were the assholes who stole your cattle. Can I say assholes?”

“Only if you mean it in the strictest academic sense,” Hart said.

“Okay,” the student said. “Or maybe they were the saps who weren’t clever enough to stop you from stealing their cattle. Either way I don’t think a concept like ‘stolen goods’ really existed in anyone’s mind. It was all just who had possession.”

“Indeed, there is a whole genre of early literature in the northern Mother Isles that revolves around the stealing of cattle and reciprocal raids,” Fenwick said. “It was definitely a might-makes-right society… very similar to the Thyleans, in some regards. Of course, in the south, the seeds of what would become the old empire were already spreading out from the Mother City.”

“Is it okay to talk about something else?” a girl said.

“You mean you’re not comfortable talking about cattle raids, or you have something else you want to talk about?” Hart said.

“I have something else I want to ask about, I just don’t know what the protocol is for changing the subject,” she said.

“Just do it,” Hart said. “If someone else wants to talk more about this, they can change it back. What do you want to talk about?”

“The Thylean views on women.”

“Okay,” Hart said. “What about them?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I assume they have them.”

“Views, or women?” Hart said. “The record’s pretty clear that they had women. We can infer they had views, but what they were is still pretty subject to interpretation. As a historian, I’d say that assuming that another culture’s exactly like our own when it comes to things like how women were treated historically is one of the three biggest mistakes you can make.”

“What are the other two?” a different student asked.

“Assuming they’re much better or that they’re a whole lot worse,” Hart said. “Especially when you’re comparing groups like the Thyleans to those of us of Metro descent… well, if this room isn’t at least twenty-five percent Thylean by blood I’d start wearing hats so I’d have something to eat. Not to turn the topic back to whiteness, but people of Thylean descent are going to be nearly invisible among us. At this point in time, our cultures are pretty outwardly homogenized.

“You could go just about anywhere in the Thylean Federation and get by speaking Pax and relying on the other things you’ve learned at home. You might commit a blunder or two, but we’re at the ‘look at the funny foreigner and his quaint ways’ level of difference, not the ‘what strange outland sorcery be this?’ level.”

“So, what’s that mean in terms of women?”

“It means that traditionally women have been the mothers and midwives, that they’re still more likely to be homemakers than men, that they haven’t always had the same level of political power as men, and whether they do now or not is up for debate on a practical level, but under the law they’re equal,” Hart said. “You’d have to ask a Thylean woman what her views on her society are, and vice-versa. I’d say it’s probably mostly what you’d expect, though.”

“Actually…” another student said. “I read a thing recently about how they’re re-evaluating the roles of women in Thylean society. At least, among the settlements in the Mother Isles.”

“Okay, see?” Hart said. “Like I said, there’s a room for interpretation. What did you read?”

“I think I read that, too,” a different student said. “Was it about the skeletons?”

“Yeah,” the first student said. “The thing is that traditionally when we’ve seen a skeleton with a sword, everyone just assumed it was male… you know, warrior corpse equals male corpse, right? Especially when it’s coming at you with a sword.”

“Given the legendary tenacity of a Thylean barrow-wight,” Fenwick said, “I think we can excuse adventurers of generations past for not stopping to sex the skeletons before re-slaying them.”

“No comments from the necromancy students, please,” Hart said. “But, so… I take it that someone’s started doing forensic divinations on some of the, uh, re-dead corpses and it’s changing some minds?”

“Yeah, it seems that a good number of them are… were… female.”

“This is how the historical record progresses,” Hart said. “And so we continue to get a clearer picture of the world, through probing analysis and not just relying on what the received wisdom of the ancients tells us.”

“The ancients would have had quite a lot to tell you about shield-maidens and spear-maidens,” Fenwick said.

“Yes, well… these ones had swords,” Hart said. As much as I loathed Fenwick Hall’s supercilious tone, I had to admit it was a pretty poor objection.

“The tales of the northmen are replete with warrior women of all stripes,” Fenwick said. “The valkyries, for instance.”

That made my interest perk up a little. My favorite fantasy show, Mecknights, had a minor character who was supposed to be a valkyrie. I generally dislike when magic fiction elements got thrown into a fantasy series or vice-versa, but Val was a pretty cool character even if she rode a boring giant wolf more often than a motorcycle. She’d inspired enough interest in me on the subject of real-world valkyries that I’d done a little reading on the subject.

“What exactly are valkyries?” some said. “I know they ride pegasuses…”

“That’s actually a myth,” Fenwick said. “Or rather a myth-translation, I should say. ‘Valkyrie-horse’ shows up in the sagas, but it’s what we call a kenning, which is particular sort of poetic turn of phrase. For instance ‘bee-wolf’ means bear, because wolves call to mind deadly hunters, and bears hunt for honey.”

“That’s actually a myth,” Hart said. “‘Bee-wolf’ means bee wolf, a giant half-bee, half-wolf creature that’s endemic to the northlands.”

“It’s ‘endemic to the northlands’ because it’s an unnatural creation inadvertently released into the wild by an overly literal life wizard who wanted to harness the power of the legendary ‘bee-wolves’ he’d read about and created a hive of them,” Fenwick said. “He was stung and mauled to death by his creations, who propagated without any natural predators, thus giving rise to one of the most dangerous pests of the sub-polar regions and a wonderful cautionary tale. Their expansion has only been stymied by a rise in owlbears… in any case, there are no tales about actual bee-wolves prior to three centuries ago.”

“I stand corrected,” Hart said.

“To return to the subject at hand,” Fenwick said, “valkyrie-horse’ refers to wolves… when wolves show up to feast on the corpses after a battle, it’s said that valkyries rode them there. And because valkyries are described as flying through the air on their steeds, it’s assumed that a valkyrie’s horse must be winged. Whether or not actual valkyries traditionally rode wolves or not is a matter of conjecture… it’s possible that reading the poetic description as describing an actual mode of transport is still being too literal. Some modern valkyries do, but they may be doing so in imitation of the popular image, as others have adopted winged horses… and still others have similar mounts. Valkyries are psychopomps in service of divine and semi-divine powers, and some are granted mounts in the manner of cavalier paladins, which many latter-day valkyries actually are.”

“Are there still valkyries?” a student asked. “I thought Thylea was a Khersian nation now?”

“In the sense of ‘nation’ meaning ‘people’, mostly, yeah,” Hart said. “I don’t believe they have a state religion overall, though some of the member states of the federation do. Like Fenwick suggested, most modern valkyries actually are paladins of Khersis… like everywhere else the Universal Temple expanded into, they took on elements of the local practices.”

“Yes, correct on all points,” Fenwick said. “The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer’s path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and… somewhat paradoxically… the implacability of fate. In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways… some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons. The formal census figures show that at least one in ten Thyleans still venerate the old pantheons, though this number may be higher… less formal methods of investigation have greater measures of success in outlying rural areas, and they tend to suggest a robust and vigorous interest in the old ‘gods’.”

“Modern humans worshipping giants?” someone said. “I have a hard time picturing that.”

“Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant,” Fenwick said. “But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that was greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.

“The ruder giants we’re most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world… though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the ‘nearer’ to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become.”

“Didn’t somebody say something at some point about this not being a lecture class?” Hart said.

“Now, consider the vastness and power of a more ‘distant’ clan of giants,” Fenwick continued, “one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane… is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?

It did sound blasphemous to me… not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother’s upbringing was in play. Even if I didn’t attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of “blasphemy” in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.

“They would be immortal, for all our purposes,” Fenwick said. “They would be unbelievably powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they would have to rely on ‘local’ intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring. What does that sound like to you?”

The strange thing was that I’d heard really similar reasoning before, that “god” was just a word for someone powerful enough to say they’re a god and not have anyone dare dispute it. Of course, the person who’d said that had been an enemy of the actual gods… or at least the target of one god, and physically vulnerable to the presence and power of them as a whole.

“Wow, Fenwick,” Hart said. “That’s more… I don’t know what word to put there. But it’s certainly more than I would have expected.”

“An interesting point there,” one student said, “is that the dimensional walls get thinner around the poles. So it may be no coincidence that the giants are worshipped in the north, where they would have an easier time reaching out to worshippers, and vice-versa.”

“Hold on,” I found myself saying. “You’re right about it thinning out to the north, but it isn’t anything to do with the poles, it’s proximity to the Shift, where the walls have been breached permanently.”

“The Shift is to the east, not the north.,”

“On a flat map, yeah,” I said. “But the Shift hugs the northern wastes for more than a third of the globe… you can’t go north without getting physically closer to it unless you’re actually in the Shift, heading out.”

“But Thylea’s in the same hemisphere,” he said. “Wouldn’t they actually be getting closer to us?”

“You’re still thinking flat,” I said. “When you’re standing on top of the world, it doesn’t have any sides, so if you’re taking a polar route it’s basically the same distance to anywhere.”

Seeing the blank stares I got from around the room, I almost gave up. But I knew I was right. One of the few non-religious sources of acceptable reading material at my grandmother’s house had been books on aviation, including aerial navigation.

“Okay, look,” I said. “Imagine you go straight north from here until you are one hundred miles south of the pole. Now imagine other points all along the globe, all a hundred miles south of the pole. In Thylea. In the Khazarus. Everywhere else. If you travel the one hundred miles to get to the pole, you are one hundred miles from all of those points. The one you started from, the ones on the far side of the globe from it… none of them are any farther or closer.”

“Granting that’s true, that doesn’t make Thylea any closer to the Shift than our own northern wastes,” the guy who’d advanced the polar theory said.

“Yeah, but the same is true of the pole,” I said. “So either way, geography alone can’t explain giant-worship.”

“I take it that while the cause is disputed, it’s established fact that the northern regions are in fact more… porous?” Hart said. We both nodded. “Interesting… that’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“I think you’ll find, sir, that the cause isn’t really in dispute,” the other student said. “Planar topology is my specialty. The Shift-based theory is an interesting footnote, but there have been expeditions mounted to the south pole that could prove the polar theory once and for all. None of them have ever returned… but the ways in which they haven’t returned is very suggestive.”

“I am no planar topologist,” Fenwick said, “but I don’t find this phenomenon the least bit surprising.”

“I said it was interesting, I didn’t say I was surprised,” Hart groused.

“The lore of the world’s northern cultures is replete with stories of otherworldly happenings. The people of Whale Island tell of the sorcerer-king who came out of the sky in a basket of whicker and traded a handful of emeralds for seal-skins to repair his… this is the exact translation… ‘gas-bladder’,” Fenwick said. “And then we have the reliquary of Ylim, which houses artifacts brought to this world along with semi-regular falls of fish that plague the surrounding region. The most recent such incursion included a number of what appear to be arcane government documents and a child-sized black brassiere.”

“Was this last fall?” I asked.

“What, did you lose a bra?” Hart said, and there was some scattered laughter.

I had, in fact, lost all of my clothes and a magical knife to a remote-cast teleportation spell gone awry, but I wasn’t about to say that in front of the class. I regretted even asking, as there was no real reason to suspect the “child-sized” bra was mine. Bras probably did not get bounced across the dimensional ether with any great frequency, but it was still a bit of a long shot.

“No, it was actually just under three weeks ago,” Fenwick said. “The skyfalls of Ylim occur far more frequently than once a year, though they don’t always include anything more interesting than fish.”

“The mystery bra of Ylim is actually pretty fascinating,” the would-be planar topologist said. “Most of the items that come through the local ‘riftlet’ are clearly of extraplanar origin, made up of exotic types of matter… some people actually believe that a lot of it is atomic. But the bra has people buzzing, because it’s the first time anything’s come through that registers as having a local origin, for as long as thaumatologists have been studying it. The most likely explanation, of course, is that it didn’t come in the skyfall… it just happened to be lying in the field, or was planted there as part of a hoax.”

“How would a bra end up discarded in a field, though?” someone said, to immediate snickering.

I decided not to say anything else, and I tried not to think about it. If there were pictures of the “mystery bra” on the ethernet, I could probably confirm things pretty quickly if it wasn’t anything at all like mine. But what if it looked like mine? That wouldn’t really prove anything, unless they had really close-up and detailed images that showed how the tag was frayed and where the color had rubbed off on the bottom of the strap… and what did I do, if it was mine?

I didn’t exactly want it back… I’d grown about half a cup over the last year, and I had no idea where it had been. Knowing its origin and last known worldly location might help the researchers in some way, and possibly something about the bra or the “riftlet” or something would help establish exactly what had gone wrong that day, but I really didn’t see the net benefit in achieving notoriety as the girl whose underwear had ended up… wherever Ylim was.

Even so, I’d probably end up looking it up anyway, just for the sake of curiosity.

“Talking about religion,” someone said. “My thaumatology textbook last year talked about ‘northpersons’ being able to turn into a bear, or take on bear-like qualities… now I’m a little confused if that was literally talking about bears, or if by bear they meant wolf and by wolf they meant horse and by horse they meant pig…”

“You can be fairly certain they were indeed referring to bears,” Fenwick said. “The famous berserkers… the term literally refers to bears, though in modern ages it’s become less literal and more generalized to refer to many different sorts of ‘battle-rages’.”

“I didn’t really understand what the book was saying about how they did that,” the student said. “Was it like druidry, or were they just wear-bears, or did it have something to do with the giant worship thing?”

“It has more in common with druidism, I suppose,” Fenwick said. “The matter is somewhat complicated by the fact that actual were-bears have tended to gravitate towards the northlands, where they stand a better chance of being accepted… or as passing for fully human bear-skin-changers. That is to say that a story taken to be about a were-bear might have been a marauding Thylean berserker, or vice-versa. But spontaneous natural shapeshifting does occur among Thyleans, and it’s a natural magical feat, not a divine gift.”

“What’s the actual difference between someone who turns into a bear and a were-bear?” another student asked. “I would have figured they were the same thing.”

“Well, to go back to last class a bit,” Hart said, “a were-person has two natural forms. A human can take on another form… or an animal can, I suppose… through any number of different means. Pop culture sometimes lumps anyone who’s going between a single humanoid and single animal form together as ‘weres’, but they’re a particular class of shapeshifters.”

“Also on the subject of religion,” another student said. “You were being pretty general talking about what worshipped giants might be like… what are the actual giants that Thyleans have worshipped like?”

“Well, there are actually three competing ‘pantheons’ or tribes,” Fenwick said. “The chief one, or at least the one that’s been most ascendant most recently, is the one most analogous to the beings we conventionally style as gods. While there are some who are called a ‘lord of battle’ or a ‘war god’, they’re all renowned for their battle-prowess, in much the way that mortals would be. The chief god is Vengr, a word that might mean ‘swinger’… with connotations towards hanging… or ‘catcher’ or ‘picker’, with shades of harvesting souls. Vengr is sometimes described as a force of evil, but is more of a morally complex figure. Just as the raiders of older eras didn’t necessarily consider the moral implications of killing and stealing, a god associated with death and slaughter wasn’t necessarily evil to the Thyleans. Vengr is the one who recruited the first valkyries, and who sent them forth to collect the souls of fallen mortal warriors to join him in his hall, hence the appellations.

“More modern tales… especially foreign interpretations… try to frame the Thylean titans as good or evil, with the ones associated with the underworld or seen as tricksters most often drafted for the role of villain, but the truth is that for however high above them they are, they are a people and they have feuded among themselves and have done good things and bad things. Now, of course, they did participate in the war against our gods back in the dusky dawn of time, or their forefathers did… and whether that makes them good or evil is something that different religions have different opinions about… certainly, theologians don’t universally hail all the gods who fought against the giants as all good.”

It was a fair point, though one that sparked a certain amount of controversy. A debate went back and forth for a while about the nature of godhood and the morality of gods… I found myself retreating from it mentally, though.

My grandmother’s education on the subject was hard to shake, and it didn’t exactly leave me in a position to make an informed or respectful contribution on the topic. Even knowing that what I’d learned was at the very least badly shaded by bias, though, I was still uncomfortable hearing others say things I’d been taught to disapprove of.

Fortunately, that topic eventually died down, and Hart spoke into the awkward silence that followed it.

“Here’s a question,” Hart said. “What nation has the highest average standard of living for its people? Anybody? Come on, this isn’t a quiz… it’s still a discussion. A lot of you are being quiet because you’re thinking it’s probably Magisteria, but you’re also thinking I wouldn’t be asking if it actually was Magisteria. Well, let me just tell you: it’s not Magisteria.”

“It’s got to be Thylea,” someone said. “That’s what we’re talking about, right?”

“It can’t be,” someone else said. “He’s probably trying to make us think that. There’s got to be a trick, right?” He looked at Hart, who just sort of tilted his head and shrugged.

If others hadn’t been voicing these thoughts out loud, I probably would have been thinking them… but hearing other people say them, I couldn’t help notice how it was sort of backwards in relation to the point of the class. It was like trying to pass a test by getting inside the teacher’s head… it was possible, and the better students tended to be better at it. But it wasn’t the same thing as learning the material… or learning about the material, which seemed like the higher goal.

Of course, I also couldn’t help thinking that it probably was Thylea, for no better reason than that was the topic Hart had wanted to talk about.

“It could be the Mother Isles,” another student said. “I mean, they’re Thylea’s neighbor and we’re talking about how Thylea relates to stuff throughout history, so this could be about how Thyleans raided the Mother Isles because they’re rich.”

“Okay, any discussion’s an improvement over no discussion, but let’s try to steer clear of the meta-analysis here,” Hart said. “Anatomy of an Aaron Hart Class will be a fascinating academic topic and a required course for all students in the year 300 onward, I’m sure, but let’s talk about reasons why a nation would have a high standard of living, not reasons why I’d bring it up.” He turned to the student who’d said the Mother Isles. “Like, you said ‘they’re rich.’ How do you mean that?”

“Well… the Mother City’s all palaces and columns and stuff,” he said. “Palatine looks like that, but it’s like a tenth the size and not even a tenth as old.”

“It’s a big empire, though,” Hart said. “Not everybody lives in palaces.”

“No, but it’s a really modern nation,” the student said. “You’re right, I would have expected the Imperial Republic to have the highest standard, but if it’s not us, it’s got to be the older version of us.”

“Except,” another student said, “if we’re talking about averages, then… well, maybe the Mother City or Palatine by themselves would have really high standards of living, but there are all the outlying provinces and the little backwater towns and the places that imperial protections don’t really protect, right?”

“What’s a ‘modern nation’, anyway?” a different student chimed in. “Isn’t every nation that’s around right now ‘modern’? Are older countries more modern, or newer ones?”

“I meant modern in, you know, outlook,” the student who’d used the phrase said. “I don’t think it’s got anything to do with how old something is… a really old country could be advanced because they’ve had time to get advanced, or they could be living in the past because they’ve got a lot of tradition and things weighing them down. It all depends.”

“Okay, but I think the point stands,” Hart said. “How are you defining a modern outlook? Is it circular… is it an outlook similar to nations that strike you as modern? Or do you have some actual criteria in mind?”

“I don’t think you could define criteria without pointing to a ‘modern nation’ as an example of why,” one student said. “So maybe it is all circular. Or maybe it’s a case of knowing things when you see them.”

“What does this have to do with the question? Aren’t we getting off-topic?”

“Well, if I may engage in a bit of ‘meta-analysis’ myself,” Fenwick said, “I suspect the ultimate goal of Aaron’s question was to foment discussion, which it has.”

“The answer was Thylea, by the way,” Hart said. “The Thylean Federation has a higher per capita income, a very low percent of their population living below the poverty line, and just overall happier people, as measured on several different indexes, than either of the two empires. This contrasts pretty strongly with our stereotypical views of the northlands and the people who live there.”

“Why are they so well-off?” someone asked.

“Well, part of it is their resources,” Hart said. “The two empires are richer in total, but there are a lot more poor people and a lot more resource-poor areas in them. Thylea has some of the largest mithril deposits in the world, certainly the largest ones in human hands. And to go back to that whole ‘modernity’ thing… well, you name it and the Thyleans have probably been doing it for longer. Seafaring. Ocean trade. Even modern government… the Thylean parliament is the oldest continuously sitting human house of government. As institutions go, the imperial seat of the old empire is older, but the senate has been dissolved and reconstituted so many times over the ages, and it hasn’t always been the same thing. In fact, our modern senators… being semi-representative elected offices… have a lot more in common with the Thylean model than they do with the original imperial senate, which was about social class.”

“Is ‘representative government’ really government?” a student asked. “It’s always sounded like a fancy name for anarchy to me.”

“Well, I won’t be weighing the pros and cons versus, say, an imperial republic,” Hart said. “But… it gets the job done. They have laws, and the protection of laws. Fenwick said that the rule in the Mother Isles was might-makes-right… at that time, a Thylean who killed another Thylean would be expected to pay a penalty, which was prescribed by law. Punishments could include literal payment, or exile… like I said before, a lot of Thylean explorers were looking for greener pastures to ride out the term of their exile. And yes, some of them ended up here… or rather, in Greater Magisteria, or the smaller islands of the Westering Lands.”

“What did they do here?”

“Set up colonies,” Hart said. “Or tried to. They didn’t have a lasting presence in Magisteria. There is some evidence of transoceanic trade with kobolds and dwarves, which probably helps explain why they never really made it here… trying to deal peacably with both of those peoples at once takes such a legendary level of diplomacy that it’s become part of the foundational myth of our nation. The Thyleans of that age weren’t the simple ‘barbarians’ we write them off as, but I doubt they were up to that.”

“On the subject of dwarves and things,” another student said, “I know there are dwarven kingdoms in the Thylean Federation. What was that like, back in the day? Did they get along?”

“Old Thylea was pretty much a model of racial diversity, compared to just about anywhere else at the time,” Hart said. “Strength and skill were respected above all else. Dwarves, elves, and humans all might be found within the same enclave… not really a clan, because there were no ties of kinship, but more than a run-of-the-mill adventuring party. I think the concept is translated as a ‘fellowship’.”

“Indeed,” Fenwick said. “In fact, it was a custom among the wilder elves of the continent to journey north when they were young and join a Thylean warband, spending a human lifetime or two living that wild and raucous lifestyle. Those who survived would eventually leave to rejoin their immortal kindred, which prompted some interesting myths on the part of the Thylean humans about the nature of elven mortality and their homeland. The local elves, who mostly lived apart in their snowy forests, were viewed as ‘full elves’ who were truly immortal, while those who came from points south and stayed for a time before leaving or dying a violent death were believed to only be elves in part.”

“But, anyway,” Hart said, “it’s really their system of laws that I was thinking of when I brought up their impact on the modern world. We think of the little democratic flourishes in our system as being the product of elven influences, by way of the Ardanians, but we owe more to the Thyleans there than we often acknowledge. It’s just not in keeping with our image of them to think of them as parliamentarians and peacemakers, of lawgivers and order-keepers… but the thing about a ‘warrior society’ is that if it doesn’t have formal rules for its internal dealings then it’s never going to last long enough to make it across the sea.”

He glanced up at the timepiece.

“And we’re just about out of time for serious discussion, so if anyone has anything they want to quickly ask more about, now’s the time… otherwise let’s hear some ideas for next week.”

“So… that thing of separate halves,” a student asked. “How does that apply to someone like a mermaid?”

“You mean, is their top half legally human and their bottom half legally fish?” Hart said, to scattered bits of laughter. “They’re not actually talking about that kind of halves.”

“No,” the guy said. “They can change forms, from, you know, mermaid to something more human-looking.”

“I know merfolk can split their tails into legs, but that’s not quite as drastic as a werewolf, or a half-dragon,” Hart said. “I don’t see that the decree would apply. She’d still clearly be a mermaid, in either form.”

“I have a friend who dated a mermaid for part of last year,” he said, “and he said that she could… make her scales go away, and then she looked pretty much like a human. So, legally, would she be a human?”

“Okay. I did not actually know that,” Hart said. “But the specific thing about Separate Halves… you have to remember that it was originally applied to werewolves. And Thylean bear-skin adepts, but I swear I’m trying not to steer the conversation around to them. A werewolf does not adopt the appearance of a human. A werewolf in its… his.. werewolves in their human form are human. That’s the point of the decree. There are these dwarves who can turn their hands into axes and hammers and picks and things…”

“Bonesmiths, I believe you mean,” Hall supplied.

“Yes. Dwarven bonesmiths,” Hart said. “The law doesn’t need a Decree of Separate Halves to treat a bonesmith as a dwarf, whether he’s got a hand for a hand or an axe for a hand. I don’t know what actually goes on with a mermaid’s physical form when she goes from having a tail to having legs, but I suspect it’s got more in common with a bonesmith than a werewolf.”

“Just so,” Hall said. “Indeed, there are rumors that the bodies of merfolk are more protean than most land-dwellers would imagine. It is well-known that many tribes of shore-dwelling merfolk, colloquially known as ‘sirens’, can transfigure their upper limbs into wings… why should not their cousins in the deep be able to assume a flipper-like configuration? And yet the sirens remain just as human… which is to say, not at all… when they show traits of mammals, reptiles, and birds.”

“Good question, though,” Hart said to the guy who’d asked. “We’re dealing with a big topic and so a lot of concepts we only passed over with a glance, but this is a long period so there’s no reason we can’t stop and amplify something if it wasn’t clear.”

“I have a question for Professor… uh… Hall, I think?” a girl said. She was looking at him, but a little uncertainly… I supposed that if I didn’t have prior experience with one of them, I might have found it hard to keep track of which was which after the brief introduction at the beginning of the class.

Hall looked at Hart.

“I believe that in the interest of fostering discussion and lessening confusion, we can do away with a degree of formality,” he said. “I have no objection to being addressed by my given name, by anyone who feels comfortable doing so.”

“If you can stand to be called ‘Fenwick’, I guess I don’t mind being Aaron,” Hart said.

“Okay, Professor Fenwick, then,” the girl said. “How exactly did dragons change during the Fall? You said they became mortal, but what did that actually entail in terms of their abilities?”

“Oh, yes,” Fenwick said. “Well, just as what seems to be a relatively simple idea like ‘shapeshifting’ can actually cover a variety of concepts, so, too, does one like ‘mortality’. Dragons have always been prone to aging and to death, though there’s little in the way of proof that great and greater dragons will ever die of old age. When one speaks of ‘mortals’ in relation to dragons, one is usually referring to the so-called created kinds, the order of creation that humans and elves and dwarves belongs to… the sorts of beings sometimes erroneously and prejudicially referred to as ‘humanoids’.

“During the Fall, every intelligent dragon within the sphere of the world was transformed into the form of a so-called humanoid, and the less intelligent dragons became a variety of hunting beasts. It is from the latter category that the world’s population of chimerae descended, as they followed their new instincts and mated with natural beasts of their newly assumed kind.”

“As far as their abilities are concerned,” Hart said… and to me, he was still Hart, “the intelligent dragons didn’t lose any of their accumulated knowledge or magical power. They couldn’t fly by flapping the wings they’d lost, or breathe plumes of fire or lightning. To what extent they retained their less physical abilities is hard to judge. They weren’t in any hurry to advertise the extent of their power loss.”

“There are stories about the trapped dragons displaying draconic-level feats of strength,” Fenwick said. “But this could easily have been magic or trickery… as Aaron suggested, the de-scaled wyrms had a powerful motivation to keep up the appearance of power and strength traditionally associated with them.”

“Or it could just be stories,” Hart added.

“True enough,” Fenwick said. “Does anyone have another question?”

There was no immediate response. A few people looked at each other. I imagined there were questions on the tips of people’s tongues, but we weren’t quite into the flow of things yet. Despite my discomfort with the topics at hand, I did have a desire to know more… it just wasn’t coalescing into specific questions. I wanted to know more about such things as the Pelorians and their brief empire, and their absorption into the armies of the old empire.

“Well, if no one else has an immediate question coming to mind,” Fenwick said, “then I’d like to further the discussion by expanding on another point I found interesting, the Decree of Separate Halves. I’d be surprised if this decree… it’s a Metric one, I gather from the time frame, but it’s part of our common law, I suppose?” Hart nodded, and Fenwick continued. “Yes, well. As a sidenote, I’d be very surprised if this Decree has ever been applied to a full-blooded dragon who assumed a human form through whatever means. Do you know anything about that, Aaron?”

“To my knowledge, it hasn’t,” Hart said. “Though I’ve never looked into it. Anyway, your half-dragon has two natural forms that aren’t just different races, they’re different kinds of creatures. Orders?” He looked at Fenwick for confirmation, who nodded. “I don’t think that last part matters. If there were such a thing as a were-elf, who was human most of the time and elf some of the time, Separate Halves would still apply. The key is that they’re different kinds of creatures, or beings, or people. Like the werewolf, the half-dragon really is human and really is dragon. Does that make sense?”

Around the room there were some scattered nods.

“I guess what I would like to know,” one guy asked, “is how does the law decide if it applies?”

“Well, that’s really a question for lawyers,” Hart said. “I assume they look at past precedents, and if the question arises for a new type of creature someone has to make a determination of what’s actually going on. In all honesty, it doesn’t get invoked very often. It’s more important for purposes of the historical context of how we came to our current understanding of equality under the law. Nowadays… well, last year, there was an unfortunate incident on campus involving a young lady from a kingdom in the Khazarus who was killed on campus. It was put down to a monster attack, eventually, but it was initially being investigated as a murder.”

I wondered at Hart’s choice of words, when he said that Leda’s death was “put down to” a monster attack… in his history classes, he’d displayed a tendency to acerbically repeat the official line on some of the more controversial aspects of the Imperium’s history while making it clear to most of the class what he thought of it.

I doubted he knew or suspected the exact truth, but it didn’t seem beyond reason that he might not trust the official outcome of the investigation.

“Now, this young lady… like many people from that part of the world… was a shapeshifter,” Hart continued. “She could move between the forms of a swan and a human. Would she have been covered by the Decree of Separate Halves? Probably. But the question of whether or not she ‘counts’ as human never came up, because under the current law a swan-person is supposed to be the same as a human-person.”

“Um, Aaron… I have a question that’s not really directly related to half-dragons,” a girl said. “But it does relate to something you said.”

“Go for it,” Hart said. “Like Professor Hall said, let’s keep things ‘organic’.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, the thing is… I was wondering where werewolves come from?”

“If you mean, were they created in a similar way to half-dragons, I think we can probably say no,” Hart said, to more laughter. “But other than that, I really don’t know. Fenwick?”

“There are stories, of course,” Fenwick said. “Old stories, and not very pleasant ones. Persons afflicted with lycanthropy are recognized as persons these days, and are not punished for their condition, but simply held responsible for the consequences of failing to control it… but once upon a time, they were seen as a thing of nightmares. Those stories that spoke of a specific origin for them inevitably put it down to a curse or hex. But I believe that the truth is contained in a story that’s not about werewolves in particular.

“In the beginning, the goblins say, there were the Old Ones… sleeping titans, gods of chaos and primal power. And one of the old gods, a figure identified as The Claw That Corrupts, also known as the Father of Beasts and Mother of Madness, is said in some tales to have shaped beasts into the forms of mortals, or to have created a plague that would infect mortals with the forms of beasts. The story varies with the telling… and with the translation… but either way we read it, it seems clear that goblinkind attribute the creation of werewolves and similar creatures to their dark god.”

“All earlier kidding aside,” Hart said, “I think we do have to take these theological stories with a grain of salt. They seem less likely to be contemporary accounts that were handed down and more likely to be retrospectively trying to put together pieces from before any race has any credible knowledge.”

“True, perhaps,” Fenwick said. “We find more conflicts… or competition, if you will… among the various accounts of creation and origin told by varying peoples. In some cases we may be able to approach the truth by looking at the commonalities between them. In other cases we’re left with irreconcilable conflicts. The interesting thing here, though, is that there are no conflicting accounts. No other story takes credit or assigns blame for lycanthropy and related plagues.”

“That’s not definitive,” Hart said.

“But it’s suggestive,” Fenwick said. “Now, I should stress that the story involving The Claw That Corrupts refers only to true werecreatures who are distinct from those who can take on the shape of animals in other ways… such as Professor Hart’s beloved berserkers, or members of certain druidic sects. Sadly it is not at all uncommon for a human who happens to take the form of a wolf to be mistaken for a werewolf. True werebeasts can pass their condition on through a bite, have some degree of a lack of control over their shapeshifting, and assume the form of ‘dire’ creatures rather than natural ones.”

“On the subject of shapeshifting…” another student said. “I wonder about half-dragon shapeshifting. How does it work?”

“Well, now,” Professor Fenwick said, “I believe that Professor Hart has touched on an important truth when he said that a half-dragon truly is both dragon and person. A half-dragon has two natural forms. Whichever form one is born in, the other form will want to assert itself. Even those whose draconic parents have no natural shapeshifting talent may spontaneously shapeshift as they mature. As for the actual mechanism? It’s best to think of it as one life, one mind, occupying two different bodies.”

“So, does the other body exist in some kind of extraplanar space when it’s not being used?” the student asked.

“Oh, heavens, no,” the loremaster said. “Nothing like that. Nor can a half-dragon survive the death of ‘one’ body. The two bodies are one, in the manner of the dualistic or trinitarian gods that were in greater favor some millennia ago, or in the Universal conception of the relationship between Khersis Dei the god and Lord Khersis the man. Definitely two separate bodies. Definitely one unified one. It’s a difficult idea to grasp from within the framework that we exist in, I admit.”

Yeah, that idea seemed to take some getting around for a lot of the students. I dealt with it by accepting that I didn’t understand it, but I’d had some practice… my grandmother had been a staunch member of the Universal Temple of Khersis.

“So… would a half-dragon born to a dragon mother be born in dragon form?” was the next question.

“If the mother resumes her dragon form and lays an egg, then yes,” Fenwick said. “That has been known to happen. If she carried the pregnancy to term in the form of a human or elf, the offspring would be the same as a half-dragon born to a human or elven mother and a dragon father. The stories are not quite unanimous on this point, but it seems that some half-dragons who are ‘born dragons’ may be accepted by their kin as full dragons, though of a lesser caliber than their parents. At the very least they seem to have the option of ‘passing’ for a dragon.”

“So is that where lesser dragons come from?” another student asked.

“That seems unlikely,” Fenwick said. “Dragons of lesser ranks have always been more common than those of greater ranks, and one of the traits that distinguishes the greater ones is that shapeshifting abilities are more common among them. But the ranks of common dragons have certainly been bolstered by mixing with mortals… any non-great dragon who can assume a mortal form without powerful and difficult magic likely has a parent or ancestor of that mortal race.”

“If dragons don’t approve of hybrids, why do some of them mate with mortals in the first place?”

“Well,” Fenwick said, “while we don’t have anything like a census, it seems that more half-dragons were born during the era of the Fall than any time before or since… from that, we can infer that the intelligent dragons were also prey to their new bodies’ instincts.”

“But what about the ones born before and after? Why would there be any?”

“Well, there’s a danger in thinking of dragons as a monolith,” Fenwick said. He chuckled. “Though the resemblance can be uncanny, depending on the type of dragon and the angle from which it is viewed in repose… no, in all seriousness, to understand how this can be you must only think of any activity that your own society can be said to disapprove of, and then count all the examples of that activity you have witnessed, heard about, or performed in your own lifetime.”

“How exactly do we get the views of dragon society about that kind of thing?” another student asked.

“That’s an excellent question,” Fenwick said. “The thing is, ‘dragon society’ is perhaps something of a contradiction in terms. Even the most sociable dragon is a fairly solitary creature. Dragons covet the approval of other dragons, but they don’t tend to seek it… that is to say, dragons do as they please, but when they do something they think would garner the envy of their peers they crow about it. Thus, the culture of dragon consists largely of boasts… the written form of High Draconic, from which our own alphabet descends, was invented solely to disseminate news of grandiose claims and great feats farther and faster.”

“On the subject of grandiose claims, I think you might be overstepping a bit,” Hart said. “Dragons are some of the best record-keepers in the world. They’re basically nature’s accountants.”

“If you use a somewhat expansive definition of ‘nature’, perhaps,” Fenwick said.

“Okay, whatever,” Hart said. “My point is that records taken from dragon hoards… and, in some cases, copied by scribes who paid an exorbitant price for the privilege… give us accounts of things like the geography, weather, and population of their dragon hunting territories in minute detail. They don’t always mark time on a scale that’s convenient for building a timeline, and sometimes there are large gaps where the dragon might have been sleeping or absent, but dragons use their script for their own convenience often enough that it seems questionable that they invented language just to trade boasts.”

“Ah,” Fenwick said, “but before your well-heeled scribes took an interest, how often did these dragons share their records? Dragons do not, as a rule, think of posterity. They can plan for the long term… for extremely long terms… but in general, their viewpoint is on the here and now. The treasures they store aren’t being stored for future use, they’re being stored for the present and every present that follows. Likewise, the records are for the dragon’s own benefit. The practice of record-keeping may have arisen in isolation, that I’ll grant, but a shared language?”

“They could have brought it with them,” Hart said.

“From across the void?” Fenwick said. “It’s possible, assuming that dragons weren’t native to our sphere, but we’re still stuck with the same basic problem: why would a shared language have arisen if it wasn’t being used to communicate? Unless draconic nature was once fundamentally different, it seems likely to me that their script was created for boasting, not for bookkeeping.”

It seemed that Hart couldn’t find anything to fault in that logic.

“You see,” Fenwick said, with a hint of triumph twinkling in his eye, “we keepers of lore do not ‘uncritically’ pile up stories. It takes a degree of discernment to untangle the disparate threads of many knotty traditions and weave them together into a useful tapestry of knowledge.”

“Point to lore,” Hart said. He looked around the circle for a distraction, but no one was volunteering a question. His gaze fell on a girl. “You look like you’ve had something on your mind for a while now.”

“Um, yeah,” she said. “When we were talking about all the people with dragon blood born during the Fall. The ones who didn’t shapeshift… which I guess was all of them, during the Fall… but what distinguishes them, if they don’t show draconic appearances?”

“Well in some cases… particularly during the Fall… the draconic parent was known,” Fenwick said. “In later cases it was often only rumored, or inferred when those traits that will not be suppressed began to manifest themselves.”

“Here’s where we get into the area of history vs. lore again,” Hart said. “There’s not a lot of actual evidence for a lot of the so-called ‘dragonblooded heroes’. In the earlier Age of Heroes… also known as the Classical Age of Heroes… we saw this with figures who performed great feats and achieved far-reaching fame being acclaimed as descendants of various gods. The thing is that in most cases nobody had any idea about this lofty parentage when those heroes were alive. Is it possible that some heroic figures had divine blood that it took centuries for sharp-eyed storytellers to recognize? Sure. But I think in most cases, claiming divine blood or dragon blood is like claiming distant kinship to a king or emperor… it’s hard to prove anything either way, so it’s an easy way of puffing up one’s hereditary credentials.”

There was a possibility I hadn’t considered, regarding the question of Puddy’s ancestry… it was possible that she herself wasn’t making up the claim about having dragon blood but that it was still a lie all the same. Puddy’s family, the La Belles, seemed to be a Family with a capital F, the sort of people who didn’t just have ancestors but a lineage. But it also seemed they’d only risen to prominence a few centuries ago… might they not have concocted an illustrious and powerful ancestor further back to help cement their position?

The only problem with this theory was that they didn’t seem keen to advertise the mixing that had gone on inside their family. From Puddy’s account, they were still hushing up a dwarven ancestress even though having a small measure of dwarf blood had become slightly fashionable with the elevation of Magisterion XIII.

Still…

“Professor Hart?” I said.

“Yes?” he said.

“Given the Decree of Separate Halves, and the fact that dragon blood doesn’t really ‘mix’ with human blood the way elven and dwarven blood do… well, I don’t know if this is actually a history question, but I was wondering if it seems possible that a human family that would be loathe to admit to non-human blood might ‘puff itself up’ with dragon blood, as you put it,” I said. “Since it wouldn’t be seen to diminish their humanity.”

From the slim smile hiding within his bushy beard, I kind of suspected that he knew exactly what I was getting at. I didn’t know if he’d ever had a run-in with Puddy, but he’d butted heads with at least one of her innumerable cousins.

“Yes, it’s possible,” he said. “I won’t name names, but at least one of the first families of Prax is almost as infamous for its dubious claim of a dragon ancestor as they are for hushing up their dwarven blood.”

Well, that was one mystery solved, more or less. As Hart himself would say, it wasn’t definitive… but it did give something of an explanation.

I’d done my best to stop caring about Puddy over the course of the last year. Switching dorms meant that we were no longer living on top of each other, no longer moving in the same sphere. Still, it was hard to ignore an anomaly and there was much that was anomalous about Puddy Banks-La Belle.

There was a little voice in the back of my head that said that the rumored dragon blood might be more than a rumor, if Hall was right and dragon blood carried the potential for heroic feats. That would explain how Puddy was able to display such incredible strength intermittently… I’d assumed it had something to do with the chain of faerie gifts that seemed responsible for the La Belles’ elevation to the position of a “first family of Prax”, but there was no way to know for sure.

“So, if dragon blood doesn’t exactly mix,” I said, directing my attention to Fenwick, “then as it gets ‘bred out’ over the generations… would the recipients basically have lower potential for displays of the same levels of strength and power of their ‘purer’ ancestors?”

“In essence, yes,” Fenwick said. “The whole thing seems to get unpredictable over successive generations, but one way to look at it is that someone seven generations removed from a full-blooded dragon does not have one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth of a dragon inside himself, but has a one in one-hundred-and-twenty-eight chance of manifesting some aspect of full dragonhood. That’s an oversimplification, obviously, but it conveys the general idea.”

“Still,” Hart added, “there’s are many other ways to come by the ‘greatness’ that gets chalked up to something like dragon blood. Durkon’s Hammer applies.”

“I believe applying Durkon’s Hammer would leave one to conclude that someone who displays strength or will or magical puissance equal to a dragon is most likely, in some measure, a dragon,” Fenwick said.

“Here’s the thing,” Hart said. “This whole idea of heroic traits coming from ‘hidden’ dragon blood comes in part from the notion that not all dragons are natural shapeshifters, right? But the other part is that dragon side is too strong to be denied.”

“Yes, hence the manifestation in great feats,” Fenwick said.

“But why in so many individuals is it just in great feats?” Hart said. “In every case where there is provable ancestry from dragons, it manifest physically. The most striking example is the Pelorians. Here we have part-humans, part-dragons who look for all the world like humanoid dragons. When the proportion of dragon blood is smaller, we get humans with dragon eyes, or with scaly-textured skins, or with claws or wings or horns.”

“Well, such accessories could be one way that the dragon blood shows itself,” Fenwick said. “That doesn’t mean that it’s the only one.”

“No, but I’m not aware of a documented case with a provable lineage to a dragon that doesn’t carry such markers,” Hart said.

“As you might say: that’s not definitive,” Fenwick said.

Even though Fenwick Hall had showed Hart up a bit on the matter of the draconic script, I was inclined to believe that Hart was on more solid footing here. Given the inherent power of dragons, it was natural that important and powerful people might claim a connection to them, or would have such a connection ascribed to them by those who came after… but given that power, it was hard to imagine it would be content to lie dormant and wait until a burst of epic heroism was needed. It seemed more likely that the blood would show itself somehow.

I kind of distracted for a while with the thought of Puddy and her obnoxious relatives all giving themselves away with scales or horns or something, and so I missed when the discussion first turned to a topic I’d been curious about. When my attention came back to the class, I noticed that Hart had stepped outside the circle and dragged a portable whiteboard over towards the edge of it. He was scrawling a very rough map on it.

“Okay,” he said, drawing a wavy mostly vertical line. “This is the east coast of Magisteria and the Westering Lands. Then across the ocean we have the Mother Isles… the Mother Isle itself, home of the Mother City, here kind of center-ish. Their empire became very spread out in the centuries after the Fall, but before that and increasingly today it was mostly concentrated in the islands and the areas of the mainland nearest to them to the east.”

He sketched that coast line even more vaguely than he had the Magisterian one.

“There’s a bunch of stuff in between, of course, but I’m not showing it. The first Pelorians, on the other hand, were born here… ish,” he said, sketching a bunch of little pointy peaks to the east of the coast. “About nine hundred miles inland, in the land-locked region of Pelorus, also called the Giant’s Fist because it’s where the great mountain chains get all bunched up. This whole area was rife with dragons of different colors, so it had always been contested territory.”

He sketched a bunch of dragons flying around the mountain, though they might as well have been a swarm of bats… or Ms and Ws.

“When the Fall came,” he continued, “all of a sudden they had other things on their mind… or at least, they had less ability to fight over huge swaths of land. So for seven hundred years, in this one region, there was something like a dragon society. And while there was a lot of mating among the trapped dragons themselves, some of them bred with actual mortals, and some of them bred with the offspring from those liaisons. So by the time the Fall ended, there was a whole population of thousands of people with more dragon blood than human.

“The ones who were mostly descended from greater dragons basically became dragons… a little more mortal in their sympathies, maybe, but basically dragons. But common dragons have always been more common than great ones, so a lot of them didn’t have any ability to shapeshift… and that draconic blood outed itself in a big way. Technically, anybody who’s from the Pelorus might be called a Pelorian… but no one actually identified as Pelorian before the Fall. It was contested territory in more ways than one, since it borders on practically everything that was considered important in continental life. The Fall created the first society that identified itself as ‘Pelorus-ian’, and today draconic humanoids are called Pelorians, even if their ancestors came from somewhere else entirely.

“Now, the Giant’s Fist was important to all the more easterly continental powers, and those in the Nigh-East and the Khazarus,” Hart continued. “But to the emperor on the throne in the Mother City, it might as well have been the ass-end of nowhere. It was only because the Pelorians began expanding west after the fall at the same time that the human empire was making serious inroads east, that they came into contact. If there hadn’t been hundreds of miles of land and then a bit of ocean between the two seats of power, we’d all be speaking Pelorian Draconic right now. The empire couldn’t field a force that could match the Pelorian foot soldiers, and they couldn’t defend any of the cities they held against aerial strikes powered by dragons.

“What we see in the Pelorian/Mother Isles conflict is an example of conquest through diplomacy. The old empire never stood and fought, after their initial engagements. They just made it very costly for the Pelorians to expand to the west. They torched cities, they blighted fields, they destroyed and trapped bridges and warded mountain passes. At the same time they made overtures to the ruling council in Pelorus. The Pelorians had power and they amassed wealth, but they didn’t have what we might call ‘the good life’. Remember, before the Fall, the ancestors of the Pelorians had been dragons squabbling over mountain fastnesses and people living in terror of the dragons. The Mother City had spent those same ages perfecting what we call the ‘Metropolitan way of life’… a way of life that was appealing to the powers-that-be in Pelorus. The fact that several Fallen dragons had sought protection by attaching themselves to the human empire helped, as they were able to speak glowingly about the comforts and conveniences of civilization found in the isles.

“Eventually, the two powers came to an accord. The Pelorian elite was welcomed into the Isles as if they were returning heroes rather than enemies. The Pelorian and human armies merged together and resumed conquering the space between them, from down here to the shore of the Ardan to the south,” he said, drawing the elongated arched coastline of that sea, “and to the north right up to the traditional boundaries of the Thyleans, who we aren’t talking about today, but who proved conquest-resistant.”

“Very rousingly told,” Fenwick said.

“Oh, sorry,” Hart said. “I guess I slipped into lecture mode.”

“It’s alright,” Fenwick said. “Early days, still… but I believe we should be wrapping this up.”

“Oh, right,” Hart said. “We still need to pick out a topic for Thursday.”

“Excellent,” Fenwick said. “Also, it’s a little late, but next time let’s get things started by having everyone introduce themselves. That might help foster discussion, as well as allowing us to take a proper roll. I know at least one student I expected is missing.”

“Not a bad idea,” Hart said. “So, class… what grabs your interest? It can spring from something we discussed here… or something we didn’t discuss, like, say, Thylean explorers.”

Boom! You know the drill by now… throw out requests/ideas for next class. After I pick it and before Thursday’s class I’ll make a separate discussion post for questions.

That aside, I was excited to start the day because the majority of it was composed of classes that I wanted. I had to get through one hour of fighting at the end of the day, but there was two hour-and-a-half classes between me and it and I was looking forward to both of them.

Breakfast in the Arch was somehow less impressive than dinner had been. The slightly fancier breakfast fare just didn’t seem to benefit as much from its tacitly improved quality. The scrambled eggs looked more like something you would see pictured in a menu, being paler and with little flecks of herbs in them, but they were unsatisfying, somehow. The diced potatoes weren’t really as satisfying as the hash browns I was used to. They made omelets to order… but so did the old dining hall, and theirs were heavier and fuller.

“This isn’t breakfast food,” was how Two’s friend Hazel put it. “It’s brunch food.”

That plus how much more of a hike it was from the towers in the morning compared to the student union led us to decide that we’d stick with the old place for breakfast, though we decided that we would give the Arch a try for lunch later on and we would definitely be back for dinner.

My first class of the day was not in support of my major, but I’d been too intrigued by the concept to pass up on it: “The Making of the World: An interdisciplinary investigation of history and lore from the dawning days to the dawn of the modern era.” As a time period, “from the creation of the world until roughly the day before yesterday” maybe sounded a little broad, but as I understood it the specific focus of the class wasn’t on the period of time, it was on the things we could point to in the modern world and trace back through time.

Also, it was taught in part by an instructor I respected. I couldn’t say he was my favorite teacher, as he’d always had kind of an acerbic manner… but he was informative and interesting, and fair with his grades.

The classroom was in the familiar environs of Smith Hall, the building that housed the offices of the history department. It was an upstairs classroom with big arched windows all along one wall… actually the tops of arches that on the outside of the building extended down to the ground. A set of folding chairs had been set up in a circle in the middle of the classroom, with desks pushed off to one side. Two men were seated in a pair of chairs in the middle of the circle.

One of them I recognized… a man with strong if somewhat stormy features, salt-and-pepper hair, and as a new touch a sort of scruffy beard. Professor Hart had taught the Early Republican History class that I transferred into after transferring out of Elven History class to get my GPA out from under Ariadne’s biased thumb.

The other man looked older, though both of them could easily have been well within a decade of each other. He was on the short side and somewhat slight of frame. Though he was wearing a suit and not robes, he looked like the sort of person who might comfortably affect wizardly garb.

The two instructors were chatting quietly with each other. There were already five students in the classroom when I arrived, and they were all still getting situated, like they’d just arrived. Another four or five people seemed to follow in right behind me. It seemed like I wasn’t the only one eager for this class… which made sense, as everybody was there because they wanted to be.

This brand new class was not a specific graduation requirement for anyone. It counted towards the requirements for at least three majors but no one’s academic plan of attack depended on it. It was part of a handful of new classes that had been proposed and planned over the course of the previous spring as an initiative to modernize the MU curriculum in the same way that the campus was being overhauled.

It was still a few minutes before the actual start of class when the last chair was filled. Professor Hart broke off from whatever he was saying, stood up, and glanced around the room. He counted heads, then picked up his chair. He carried it to a gap in the circle, set it down, and then went over and closed the door.

“Good morning. I am Professor Aaron Hart,” he said. He gestured to the other man. “This is my colleague from the College of Bardic Arts, Lore Department… Professor Fenwick Hall.”

“Do not, I pray, allow my name to deceive you,” Professor Hall said, not quite stifling a chuckle. He stood and moved his chair to the spot opposite where Hart had put his. “I am an instructor, not a building.”

“Uh, right,” Hart said. He went back and stood by his empty seat. By sheer luck I was almost but not exactly halfway between them, so I could follow both of them fairly easily. “This is our first time teaching this class, and our first time team-teaching, so it may be a bit of a bumpy ride sometimes. The explosion in these interdisciplinary discussion courses is yet another brainwave from our glorious leader, peace be upon her name, Chancellor of Our Souls Bethany Davies. The ziggurat is still on order, I understand, or we’d be meeting there.”

“Also, please note!” Hall added, with considerably more excitement. “This class is meant to be an investigation more so than a lecture. Our purpose here as instructors is not to tell you answers but to lead you ever-so-gently towards questions.”

Professor Hart rolled his eyes and mouthed the words “ever-so-gently”.

“The fact is,” Hall continued, “that there has never been much in the way of a systematic interrogation of the intersections of received lore and recorded history. You students have the honor of traveling into unexplored terrain, and we are honored to be your guides and fellow travelers.”

“We are ever so honored,” Hart said.

“Yes, quite ever so,” Hall said. While I knew from experience that Hart’s effectiveness as a teacher was hampered when he was performing under protest, I was kind of heartened to realize that I wasn’t the most oblivious person in the room.

“Then let’s get ever so started,” Hart said. “Here’s the format my colleague and I have agreed upon for the class. Each time we meet we’ll agree on a topic of discussion for the next class, a time and a place for which there is both a proper historical account and… some lore. You, in the time between sessions, will do your own reading and research on the chosen topic.”

“Note that when Professor Hart says ‘we will agree’, he means you as well as the two of us,” Hall said. “You are included in the decision.”

“Yeah, yeah, ever so included,” Hart said. “The thing is that it’ll be a round table discussion, and you’ll be graded on participation as well as the strength of your ideas. Now, obviously you know we didn’t assign any topic for the first class so this is going to be a bit more free-form. Professor Hall and I are going to talk a bit about our disciplines and how we each would approach the same set of events, using specific events as examples.”

“Indeed,” Professor Hall said. “And in doing so it is our sincerest hope that you will learn to incorporate both approaches into your own interrogations”

“Or that you’ll see that one is superior to the other,” Hart said.

“Er. Oh. Yes, or that,” Hall said. “And, of course, in the course of this discussion an interesting topic for Thursday may very well put itself forward. Professor Hart, if you would care to say a few words about history?”

Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed like a dark look passed over Hart’s face before he composed it. Perhaps he didn’t care to have his “teammate” taking the lead like that.

“The study of history is an interesting contradiction,” Hart said smoothly. “You might think that the longer the world goes on, the more history we have to study, and that’s true. The contradiction is that it’s all very recent. The more ‘historical’ a time is compared to the present, the less we know of its history.

“If you look back ten years ago, you’ll find we know quite a bit about things that happened all over the world. Fifty years ago, we still have pretty complete records for anywhere the human empires or any other world power was operating. One hundred years ago, things start to get sketchy around the edges. Two hundred years ago, we know an awful lot about what we were doing but not much else. A thousand years before that, there are entire nations that we know less about than we know about specific individuals of the past two centuries. When we get as far back as the dawn of time… well, there’s a reason we call the earliest eras ‘pre-historic’. Obviously it’s not quite as straighforward as that. When we talk of ‘history’ without modifiers, we generally mean human history even if we don’t realize it, and not just human history but specifically western human history and even more specifically the history of the empires. That’s what we have the most records of and that… traditionally… is what we’ve been most interested in. When we start examining the histories of other peoples, we begin to fill in the gaps in our understanding somewhat.”

“The, ah, ‘history’ of lore is even less straightforward, I’m afraid,” Professor Hall said. “But it is in some ways the inverse of that of history. As written records have become more reliable, and communication has increased in range, speed, and reliability, the role of lore in recording and transmitting important information has decreased. New information, I should say. Of course all the old lore hasn’t disappeared, nor has its usefulness diminished. Particularly when it comes to those pesky ‘gaps’ that Professor Hart refers to.”

The two professors went back and forth for a bit, explaining the actual differences between their fields of study. It would be too much of a simplification to say that history was written and lore was oral, as both were developed from multiple sources and either one involved things that could be written down or told. It was more about the matter of approach and purpose. History was interested in why and how things happened. Lore was more about what they meant. History was more systematic and focused on the truth, when it could be determined. Lore was more utilitarian. It didn’t matter if the story itself contained some elements that weren’t factual, as long as it was still a useful story to know.

It was hard to judge how much of Hart’s apparent contempt for lore was real and how much of it was a side-effect of him not wanting to be co-teaching a class about it. I made a mental note to find out how he felt about any of his classes I considered taking before actually signing up for them.

They did move around to an actual example eventual.

“Let’s consider, for example, the Thylean exploration of the Westering Lands,” Hart said. “That there were Thylean humans and dwelves in Magisteria is now considered to be a solid historical fact, on the basis of evidence uncovered at their settlements and corroborating accounts from dwarven clans willing to discuss prior contact with humans, as well as a now-famous interview with a barrow-wight discovered at one of the settlements. Before that, we merely had stories… poetic sagas about lands beyond the sea that were so vague that they could easily have been based on the fact that there was a sea and the possibility that there might be land beyond it.”

“Well, Aaron, these stories you call ‘vague’ were in fact specific enough that after the settlements in northeastern Magisteria were uncovered, no fewer than seventeen specific geographic details of the Voyages were found to directly correspond with the locations of the settlements,” Professor Hall said. “And of course, the existence of a land across the sea was also supported by innumerable other bits of lore…”

“Like every story that begins with a stranger coming from a land across the sea?”

“Well, yes, and the sagas of Athanasia, which attested to an elven empire that spanned three continents, including one that was completely unknown to human historians before the age of exploration,” Hall said.

“My point is that with so many different stories all talking about a land across the sea, the only way to pin down whether or not there’s any factual basis for one is to find some way of verifying it,” Hart said. “Otherwise we don’t have any idea what previous generations actually did, only what they told each other.”

“And that, in a nutshell, is why studying the intersection of lore and history is so fascinating,” Hall said. “The ancient wisdom of lore acting as an expert guide to the young and inexperienced discipline of history…”

That was the first time that Hall seemed to stray at all into a comparison of the virtues of his field versus Professor Hart’s, and he was so matter-of-fact and sincere about it that I could kind of understand Hart’s frustration with the situation. Hart was making no secret of his opinion, but Hall didn’t seem to be aware that what he was voicing was an opinion at all… much less an unflattering one. If anything, his tone suggested that he was being magnanimous towards the “young discipline”.

“So, to back up,” Hart said. “We had stories from the Thyleans suggesting they’d traveled to the west and even settled there. A band of delvers exploring a hollow hill in Terra Nova uncovered what we later learned was the first Thyleans burial chamber to be found in the Westering Lands. Comparisons of the weapons and armor they looted from the chamber to similar gear in use ‘back home’ tell us that this happened approximately a thousand years ago, a time period when the northlands were independent nations and thus outside the records kept in the Mother City.”

“Also the timeframe established in the sagas,” Hall said. “And it is from the saga that we were able to ascertain the identity of the gold-bedecked figure previously known as the Cairn-Dweller, the Thylean chief Asvald.”

“The barrow-wight told us that,” Hart said. “When the cairn was breached, he declared ‘Here lies Asvald, Son of the Wolf’. In later interviews conducted by a modern-day Thylean cleric, he gave us Asvald’s full lineage and an account of day-to-day life as one of the chief’s retainers.”

“Accounts that were confirmed by lore,” Hall said.

That was pretty much how it went. Each of their examples were from times and places where we didn’t have a really complete historical record but that we did have sufficient evidence for historians to have a say: lost islands, disappearing colonies, battles with few survivors to tell the tale. The whole conversation was fascinating in the sense that they were talking about all these really interesting things but also in a slow-motion disaster kind of way. The specific details of what they were even talking about were swept away by the general impression of awkward awfulness. Hart’s exasperation with the whole situation was visibly growing, as was Hall’s awareness that he was in an argument with someone who didn’t care much for him.

“Look, we’re going all over the place and it’s getting us nowhere,” Hart said finally. “This is supposed to be a discussion class… let’s get the class involved.”

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” Hall said. “This preliminary discussion is meant to lay out some possible topics for just that discussion…”

“But we’re just talking over each other,” Hart said. “We’ve got about half the class left… let’s both propose one topic that interests us, and then we’ll have the class vote between those. We’ll conduct that discussion for the rest of class, and that way when we come back on Thursday we’ll have the dynamic somewhat established and maybe it won’t be such a… well, you know.”

“Very well,” Hall said. “I suppose we should have known better than to try to fill an hour and a half with our own nattering. What’s your topic?”

“Thylean age of exploration,” Hart said. “Asvald and the rest. There’s no more perfect a textbook example of how historical inquiry enhances our understanding of the past, and it ties into the later human explorations of the Westering Lands that lead to the Imperial Republic. What’s yours?”

“Well, I’ve always had a weak spot for dragons,” Hall said. “How about some lore and history surrounding dragon/humanoid hybrids?”

“How does that shape the modern world, exactly?” Hart asked.

“If I win, you’ll find out,” Hall promised.

Monday: Dragons it is!

How about you tell me? You are the class… vote between the two topics in the comments! If this goes well then I’ll be using audience feedback to select future topics of discussion for this class, which will exist primarily for world-building/backstory.

“Actually, we’re going to do our best to put the recent past behind us and put our focus where it should be, on the less recent past,” he was saying. He sounded weary, or worn down in some way. He looked it, too… like something had happened to diminish him somehow in the time between Wednesday and today. “I know recent events have left a somewhat unsettled feeling in many people’s minds, and that even after the press conference… well, it may have been unsatisfying in some ways. But we’re going to do our best to soldier on.”

“I don’t understand,” La Belle said.

“What part?” he asked. Maybe it was just the prospect of one more day teaching a La Belle that had got to him.

“Are we going to get to watch TV again?” she asked “That’s all I wanted to know.”

“No,” Hart said. “We’re going to be continuing with the class as scheduled.”

“But we could watch the school channel again,” she said. “That’s, like, official. It should count for the class.”

“If you want to watch the university station, you can do it on your own time,” Hart said. “It doesn’t actually have anything to do with early Republican history, so no, it doesn’t ‘count’ for the class.”

“But it did last week.”

“That wasn’t actually part of the class, it was an unavoidable interruption,” he said.

“Then can we do the thing with miniatures again?” she asked. “That’s all historical and stuff.”

“If you really want to see more miniature war re-enactments, you could join my club,” Hart said.

“Would that get me out of class? Like, to go to meetings or games or whatever you have?”

“I actually try to schedule activities for outside normal class hours,” he said. “If there were a conflict, you’d have to take it up with your professor, who would certainly have his own policies for dealing with absences. Extracurricular activities don’t give you carte blanche to miss classes.”

“But you’re my professor,” she said.

“I mean the professor who’s class you’d be missing.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You’re asking me if you could skip my class to go to meetings for a club that I run?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “That seems fair. I mean, it’s your class and your club, so… same difference, right?”

“I can’t hold a meeting at the same time I’m teaching class,” he said. As La Belle started to voice her next objection, he quickly added, “And it looks like our last few stragglers are here, so we’re going to go ahead and begin.”

She turned around to look at Steff and me, coming down the aisle towards our usual seats.

“Y’all should have taken your time,” she said.

“It’s actually time to begin the class regardless,” Hart said. “They’re just lucky to have happened to have made it right in time. Hurry up and take your seats, we’re a day behind now so we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. I want to start by talking about the subject of religion in the colonies. The old empire was officially Khersian, with the Unnameable Emperor acting as Pontifex Maximus of the Mother Temple. The establishment of a state religion separate from the Universal Temple was controversial at the time, but within the empire it was seen as a necessary bulwark against the Kharolinian influence from Merovia. The Merovians, of course, had a well-established presence to the west and south of the colonies founded by…”

It seemed that Hart was serious about making up for lost time. He was spitting all this information out at a much faster clip and with fewer pauses for reactions and interactions than normal. Once he got going, he did a better than usual job of shutting down La Belle’s interruptions than usual, if only because she seemed to have exhausted his patience… but the emphasis really was on “exhausted”. For all that he was keeping things rolling, he really did seem to be quite tired.

I knew in an abstract sort of way that professors had to have lives outside of the classroom, and that some of them even had families. It was possible that Hart was married, though he’d never worn a wedding ring that I’d noticed… okay, the most I could really say was that he wasn’t wearing a ring at that particular moment. I’d never looked before, and wouldn’t have noticed without specifically checking.

But married men weren’t the only ones with families or personal lives. I really didn’t know anything about my instructors beyond the personalities they put forward in their classrooms. If it came right down to it, I probably knew Callahan better than any of the others, because she was so open and in-your-face about everything, and because I knew at least a little bit about her personal life via Steff, even if I really strongly preferred not to think about it. Bohd had offered us a glimpse of what was undoubtedly private information, but could hardly be called part of her private life.

“Now, it would be a mistake to think of the Old Empire as being a monolith, religiously speaking,” Hart was continuing. “Or the environment of post-revolutionary Magisteria as being a promised land of religious tolerance. The real difference isn’t in the number of religions that were present, or even the specific faiths. Rather, it’s in the proportions. Approximately half of the human Magisterians were Metros. As many as a third were Universalists or Kharlonians. There was a small but significant population living in Druidic enclaves in the northeast. Unifying the newly-freed provinces into a single empire would have required either another, even more bloody war… one of conquest, rather than rebellion… or a different approach to religion and its relationship with the state. Obviously, the newly-minted emperor went with the latter. Let’s talk about the consequences of that.”

It was kind of an abrupt shift, from lecturing at a breakneck speed to calling for discussion, and I think it through a lot of us off because there was a pause where no one really did anything, and then there was a bit of shuffling all around the room.

Though I’d never thought of it in those particular terms, my mind went back to the conversation I’d had with Sooni, about the veneration of emperors. I recalled that it had actually been a hot topic of debate during the founding of the Imperium, whether people would accept an emperor who didn’t wield spiritual power and who wasn’t deified. Magisterion had ultimately decreed that no emperor could be deified until a century after his death, and then it would be up to the senate.

The senate governed under the consent of the living emperor, not the one who had died a hundred years before. When the hundredth anniversary of Magisterion I’s death came around, the once-alarming spectre of mortal rule had lost a lot of its impact and so while the senate decreed a day of celebration and remembrance in honor of the great general, there was no serious talk of deification.

No emperor since had been as universally well-regarded or respected as Magisterion I, and so while the senate still technically had the power to deify, the question never came up again.

It seemed to me like this all tied together… if there was no state-established temple, the living emperor couldn’t act as a spiritual leader, and if he wasn’t a spiritual leader in life, it was that much harder to expect him to intercede in prayer in death.

On the other hand, the most recent two Unnameable Emperors had really sort of blurred the lines there, and I wasn’t entirely clear on whether all the preceding ones had waited until death to have themselves declared divine.

I was trying to figure out how to frame this insight for the class when Hart’s gaze fell over me. I froze up, feeling utterly unprepared… but though he could obviously tell I had something on my mind, his eyes moved on.

“Well, then,” he said. “Let’s start with the Bill of Prohibitions. Obviously the Third Prohibition is a big one. ‘No Emperor nor Officer of the Imperium shall effect an establishment of religion.’”

“What actually stops emperors from ignoring the prohibitions?” La Belle asked.

“Nothing,” Hart said. “Or the weight of tradition and the fear of backlash. They haven’t all been followed perfectly by each and every emperor and senate throughout our history. But the establishment clause of the Third ranks is seen as pretty unassailable. There’s always going to be some argument about what does or does not constitute an imperial officer effecting an establishment, but in over two hundred years of Imperial Republican history, no one’s ever come close to actually declaring a state religion.”

“Could it have something to do with the fact that we don’t venerate or deify our emperors?” I found myself saying. “Or the other way around, I mean… could the diverse religions have led to that, or helped lead to it, in some way?”

“That’s a good point to raise,” Hart said. “There’s more going on there than the lack of a clear religious hegemony, of course. The popular story is that Magisterians wouldn’t accept an emperor who was even symbolically immortal, and I think it would be a mistake to dismiss that out of hand. As we’ve discussed before, it was some time before elves were allowed to serve openly in the higher offices, and there are still laws governing things like degree of dragonhood allowed for public servants.”

“And the mandatory retirement age of a hundred and eighty,” one of the students said.

“Yes, though I think you’ll find it’s gone up to one-ninety-six,” Hart said, nodding. “The point is that we don’t trust immortals to rule us, at least not down here on earth. But it’s perhaps too simple to say that this was the only factor in play. At the very least, we can see that conditions weren’t ripe for a god-emperor. If things had been otherwise, who can say how things might have turned out?”

“Are you sure this conversation’s not treasonous?” La Belle asked.

“It’s not,” Hart said. “Anybody who teaches imperial history at any level takes treason workshops as part of our certification.”

“It’s just, it sounds like you’re saying Magisterion would have declared himself a god, if he could have,” she said. “And that doesn’t sound right to me.”

“I’m saying I wouldn’t deign to put limits on what our illustrious founder might have done, had he the opportunity,” Hart said. “It’s a respectful position, and as Magisterion I is neither living, nor divine, nor the current emperor, it’s about as far from treason as I could get.”

“Oh,” La Belle said. “It still doesn’t seem right to me.”

“Well, by all means, don’t participate in the conversation if it bothers you,” Hart said.

“Don’t you grade on participation?”

“I also grade on grading,” he said. “If I could pass or fail students based entirely on their desire to learn, I’d do it.”

“That’s easy,” she said. “Everyone would want to learn.”

“Everybody would want to pass,” he said. “But only those who wanted to learn, would… look, this is the discussion we’re having. If you don’t want to be a part of it, you can leave.”

“No, I don’t care about it,” she said. “I just wasn’t sure.”

“Okay, well, then… moving on,” he said.

“It’s not like they can make an emperor into a real god anyway,” she said.

“Moving on,” Hart said again. “You can probably imagine that each of the different religions active in the westering lands brought their own influences to the shape and style of the early government. This was similar to the effects we’ve talked about before, of influences brought by our dwarven and elven allies. Again, the Old Empire was not a monolith, but we can see a difference between an empire build by humans that took on elements from other faces, and one built around these disparate elements from the beginning. The colonists who renounced the Old Empire and broke away from it considered themselves to be citizens of the world. This, of course, is what history books mean when they talk about the ‘cosmopolitan shift’. Magisterion or one of his advisors coined the term ‘Great Trial’ to refer to the new ways of thinking the newly formed state was supposed to embody… this is trial in the sense of a test, or even a test run.”

The subject of cosmopolitanism took up the rest of the day, with frequent callbacks to the original topic of religion. The discussion opened up a bit more, with debate as to the exact nature and extent of Magisterian cosmopolitanism. I had to confess to having mixed feelings on the subject.

It could hardly be denied that we were living in a tolerant age, compared to past ones… and the time and place covered by our class had been another relatively tolerant age, compared to what came before it. But there was also a ways to go before the dream of everyone simply being citizens of the world was realized.

People like Shiel and Dee… and for that matter, myself… were able to attend school and in theory had the protection of the law and could walk about unmolested. I mean, the present situation notwithstanding, I could usually walk from one place to another on campus without encountering obvious harassment.

But really, how much tolerance did someone need to encounter in the course of their usual day to make up for the times when people throw rocks at them instead? There were students in the classroom with me who took the opportunity to talk about how great the ideals of the Imperial Republic were and how far we’d come since, with a definite undercurrent suggesting that we were done, that we’d arrived at the end, we’d completed the Great Trial and there was nowhere left to go.

I didn’t think of myself as unpatriotic, but it was hard to listen to that kind of talk from people who wouldn’t have looked at all out of place in the halls of power of the Mother City.

On the other hand, if a society that was tolerant enough to let Iona walk around… but no, that argument was a tempting distraction from any real point. Single-racial enclaves with no traffic in or out would still have murderers. What Iona had done, she’d done in secrecy, and it was against the laws of the Imperium. There was no reflection on the amount or value of imperial tolerance in her action.

“Ms. Mackenzie, is something else on your mind?” Hart asked near the end of class.

“I guess so,” I said. “I just… I’m not sure I’m comfortable saying it.”

“Fair enough,” Hart said. “Nobody’s going to make you.”

“I’m just thinking that something that’s the best can still be made better,” I said. “And… to look at it from a different direction… even the best isn’t always necessary going to be good enough. You can be the best at something and still fail, right?”

“It seems natural,” he said. “So what are you getting at?”

“Even taking all of the stuff about cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism and Magisterian exceptionalism at face value… taking it as given that this is the greatest imperial power the world has ever seen and that people here are the most fairly treated subjects of any great power,” I said, “that doesn’t mean that we’re treated fairly enough. It doesn’t mean that we’re, you know… done.”

“So, in your opinion… the cosmpolitan experiment failed?” Hart prompted.

“In my opinion, it hasn’t succeeded yet,” I replied, and that sounded a little bit better to me. There were some rather indignant mutters from around the room, and I kind of regretted speaking up at all. I felt that rather proved my point, but I definitely wasn’t about to point that out.

“Some of you who seem unhappy with Ms. Mackenzie’s opinion were just talking about how wonderful it is that we’re equally entitled to speak our minds, as citizens of the Imperium,” Hart said. “I’d be interested to hear why your minds changed so quickly, but maybe we should save that for next week, when it happens that we’ll be covering a turbulent period during the early days of Republicanism, before the great balance was struck regarding free expression. We’ll be looking at under what circumstances Magisterion I and II saw fit to suspend the free exchange of ideas, during the scribal interdiction and the dissolution of the bardic college.”

Comparing my classmate’s disapproval to one of the least popular things our founder had done seemed a little heavy-handed, but subtlety wasn’t Hart’s strong point on his best days, and this didn’t seem to be a good one for him.

“Just as one small, final note for the day,” he added. “A sort of a heads up for anybody who’s interested, or curious… the history department is so very happy to welcome Professor Ariadne Einhorn back to the campus after a sabbatical that was far shorter than she deserves.”

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

I supposed either was really possible.

“As most of you are probably aware,” he said, his eyes slipping over Keri La Belle as he said “most”, “Chancellor Davies is going to be holding a press conference at five P.M. tonight. We have been ‘asked’ to show the conference in class. Now, we don’t have a whole class period before the conference starts, I don’t know how long it will last, or what will be said in it. I don’t even know for certain what the subject of the conference will be.”

“I wasn’t aware, actually,” La Belle said.

“Yes, I knew that,” Hart said.

“You looked at me like you thought I did.”

“Anyway,” Hart said, “there’s not a lot that we can cover, under the circumstances… I’m not sure whether it’ll be worth trying to continue class after the conference ends, so I’d like to get…”

“Hey! Do you think it’s about the dead swan girl?” La Belle said. “Don’t you think it’s a bunch of crap that one non-human dies and it’s this whole big thing, with imperial agents and press conferences and things?”

“Don’t you think if any of the humans had been royalty from a politically sensitive area, they would have received the same attention?” Hart asked. “If not more?”

“Hell no,” La Belle said. “Humans don’t get shit… we don’t have special dorms, or special meals. Nobody organizes a protest when we go missing. If we had a group for the advancement of humans, people would say it was racist.”

“Or normal,” Ms. Carter said. “There are plenty of groups that advance humanity.”

“Yeah, but, we wouldn’t be allowed to say it right in the group’s name,” La Belle said. “If we had a human channel or a united human college fund or a… a… human league, everybody would jump on their ass and call them racist until they gave up.”

“An organization doesn’t have to say they’re for humanity,” Carter said. “It’s the default state in human-controlled society.”

“What human-controlled society? Like, Hart says it’s okay that she’s getting all this attention because she was a princess, but we humans don’t even have royalty,” she said. “We’re like all advanced past that, and stuff. Oh, unless you count the emperor and empress, but that’s not inherited… is it?”

“The imperial titles are not explicitly hereditary by law, but the emperor traditionally names his successor, and in most cases the person he’s named has been both a descendant or collateral relative of his and in a strong enough position to enforce their claim. Let’s call it semi-hereditary and move on,” Hart said. “But the empires are not the only human states in the world, and there are a number of feudal states and a few constitutional monarchies with human royal families at the head.”

“Whatever, none of them even go here,” La Belle said.

“Well, that would be a very good reason for their deaths to get less attention around campus,” Hart said. “Now, ladies… I wouldn’t mind giving up half of a class period to discussing this kind of topic if I thought it would lead anywhere interesting, but since we can’t do anything more than speculate about what the Chancellor will have to say…”

“We can do that, though,” La Belle said.

“Do what?” Hart asked.

“Speculate.”

“Not in an informed way,” Hart said. “And it seems pointless when we’re going to be find out for sure in… twenty-five minutes. So, let’s talk about Republican History until then.”

“But why do you think it took…”

Thankfully, he just started talking over her at that point. It ended up being more like twenty minutes, because he got the TV set up and attuned to the university’s news feed at a few minutes before five.

“Can we speculate now?” La Belle asked.

“It seems even more pointless to do so, which makes me think there’s less chance I’ll be able to stop you,” Hart said.

“I just want to know why they waited until now to say anything about this,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure the university’s been giving statements pretty non-stop for the last four days,” Hart said. “I imagine they didn’t hold a press conference until they had something worth holding one for.”

“Don’t you think it might just be because the royal family’s coming?” someone asked.

“Well, that would fit the definition of ‘worth holding a press conference over’,” Hart said. “Guys, seriously… I don’t know any more than you do what’s going to happen and what they’re going to say.”

“Would it be the university holding the conference if they actually have something to say about the case?” some guy sitting on the end of the second row asked. “I mean, I’d think it would be the imps announcing if they’d solved anything.”

“That could be,” Hart said. “I really don’t know.”

“That’s a bunch of crap,” La Belle said. “Like you wouldn’t ask what it’s about when they told you to show it in class.”

“Who said I didn’t?”

“And they didn’t tell you?”

“No, even though the folder the dean was carrying was stamped ‘top secret and confidential unless anyone asks’,” Hart said. “One more time: I really don’t know anything. Now, let’s all be quiet… I think this is it.”

The image in the box had just dissolved from a static image of the university… one unfortunately highlighting the fountain… overlaid with floating announcements to a fixed shot of a raised platform in front of the administration building. A large number of people, students and others, were gathered in front of it. The view was pulled too far back to make out a lot of details about the people on the stage, but it looked like a lot of guys in suits. There were a large number of campus guards and provincial officers in between the crowd and the stage.

A man stepped up towards the podium and the image zoomed in on him. He looked a bit like a lawyer, and a lot like he hadn’t slept all week. His short, dark hair was neat in an air-puffed sort of way and his suit looked well-made. He cleared his throat a couple of times before he began.

“Good evening, students, members of the press, and esteemed representatives of the Lebedev family of Mariinsky Lake,” he said, and the view swung around and zoomed in on a group of people sitting in chairs near the stage. The cordon of security around them made it impossible to see much more than a mass of fur hats and coats. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Mitch McSmeagol, director of public relations for the university here. In regards to the ongoing investigation into the death of Her Royal Highness, the Princess Lidiya Petrovna Lebedeva… a matter which concerns us all very deeply… we have been informed by the Imperial Bureau of Finding of this Republic, appointed by the grace of His Excellency Magisterion XIII, that the case has been brought to a close. Chancellor Bethany Davies will be reading a statement, after which we’ll be taking a number of questions.”

There was a tiny amount of scattered clapping. He stepped back from the podium and put his hand on Chancellor Davies’s back and said something to her as she stepped up to take his place. She nodded and waved him away.

“Good evening. After a thorough inquest, the Imperial Bureau of Finding has determined that the death of Princess Lidiya was due to natural causes, relating to a monster or monsters who were able to strike due to a previously unconsidered aspect of the university’s protective spells,” the chancellor read. “We stress that there is no reason to worry about the integrity of our protective spells, which are the strongest and most comprehensive in the province. There was more than one casualty of Veil Night frivolities, and in each and every case the victim was found outside the lighted areas protected by our paths. This was also true in Miss Lidiya’s case. While no doubt she felt safe being surrounded by the protective sidewalk that ringed the fountain, the fountain itself was not so protected.”

This was about the last thing I’d expected to hear, though it was all arguably true. If the fountain didn’t have its own separate protective spells woven into it, a ghoul could drop down into the middle of it and be perfectly safe. How it would have got there was the question, and the obvious hole in the story… unless they were claiming that a flying creature had gone after Leda?

Of course, they weren’t actually claiming anything had… just there had been an unspecified “monster or monsters”. That could be a ghoul, it could be a winged terror… it could be a transformed mermaid whom the safety spells didn’t even recognize as a monster and who could just as easily walk up to the fountain and step in as Leda herself had.

Were they trying to fob this story off on the family as a quicker alternative to actually solving the case? That was a better outcome than picking a scapegoat, but only marginally so… what would stop her killer from restraining her appetite after she’d literally got away with murder?

“The death of Princess Lidiya was as tragic as it was unforeseeable, but there is a lesson in it for all of us: be careful. None of us could have guessed a person would be so vulnerable in the fountain after dark…”

“I could have,” Steff whispered.

“…but that’s all a part of why we urge students not to linger out of doors after sunset. When you have to go somewhere, travel with friends and stick to the paths. There has never been a monster attack on a student within the network of sidewalks and footpaths since it was put in back in 198. We extend our deepest sympathies to the family of the victim, the ruling Lebedev family of Mariinsky Lake, and are pleased to be able to offer them our hospitality during these trying times. We hope they will join with us in looking for a way forward, a way to prevent such future tragedies before they happen. Agent Greer from the Imperial Bureau’s field office in Enwich will now discuss his team’s findings.”

I didn’t recognize the man who stepped forward. The fact that they were using someone other than Mike Gregory to deliver the “findings” screamed cover-up to me… maybe he simply wasn’t available, but from what Lee had said it seemed like he’d be unlikely to go along with a story that served political expediency over justice. Greer mumbled his way through a statement that said nothing more than what Davies had already said, which was almost nothing.

I wondered what it would do to the official story when my information reached the authorities, but then I realized that unless Lee had been unable to get a hold of Mr. Embries completely then it was unlikely that he wouldn’t have spoken up before this plan was put into motion. Even if he was only the Vice-Chancellor, he was probably among the people on the stage, and he would probably have been in on the plan.

If they knew but were doing this anyway, what did that mean? Would they rather blame things on some unknown flying creature or mysterious hopping ghouls than go after the mermaids? What exactly would stop them?

“Did you hear Davies? ‘We hope the family will join us in not suing our asses for using their daughter as ghoul chum’,” someone said, to general snickering.

“Hey, it’s not their fault she couldn’t stay on the paths,” La Belle said. “If they sue, I hope they lose… because any money the school pays will just come out of our pockets. Why should I pay for someone else’s stupidity? I pay my fair share already.”

“No argument here,” Hart said.

“If she wanted to swim, we do have a swimming pool,” La Belle said. “Though I don’t think animals should be allowed in it.”

“She wasn’t an animal,” I said, my frustration at the situation boiling over. “She was a person.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want people-feathers and people-poop in my pool, either,” La Belle said.

“Do you even go to the pool?” one of the other girls in the front row asked her.

“I haven’t yet, but I’m paying for it with my fees,” La Belle said.

“Well, so was she,” someone else said.

“Shh,” Hart said. Mitch McSmeagol had rejoined Davies and Greer at the podium and they were getting into the question-and-answer part of it. Whoever was working the camera for the university’s news channel was having a hard time getting the view and audio pickup focused on the person asking the question. He zoomed way in past the head of the man who was speaking, getting a close up of the lip of the stage. The view jerked upwards as he pulled back, giving us a glimpse of the row of men backing the Chancellor up. They were other high-ranking university officials, probably. Vice-Chancellor Embries was indeed among them. After whizzing past him, the camera came back and focused on him, like he was the most interesting thing the cameraman could see.

The Vice-Chancellor looked entirely too pleased with himself… I meant that both in the general sense that he looked more pleased with himself than was probably altogether healthy for an individual, and in the specific sense that he looked way too happy about the idea that the institution he helped to head up was likely to be facing a lawsuit from the family of a slain student, especially since it seemed really unlikely he’d be able to claim any reward from the family in that case.

“Yes. We have already been meeting and working with the royal family, today, to come to a private solution to… any lingering… issues they may have,” Chancellor Davies was saying, as the view continued to hold on Embries. It was a little muffled, but it was easy enough to make out now that the classroom had fallen completely silent. “They are our guests in the Imperium, and we’ve extended every courtesy and cooperation to them, trying to come to terms with… with what has happened.”

“We would ask that everybody please try to respect their privacy in this time of grief,” the PR head added, quickly and smoothly cutting her off. “Thank you.”

I gathered that the “good question” she was avoiding answering had been about the possibility of a lawsuit… the mention of meeting with the family in private made me wonder just how much pull Embries could have. Enough to all but own a law firm, it seemed. Enough to broker a “private resolution” between Leda’s family and the Imperium that kept the university insulated from the worst fallout?

Pinning it on a totally random wandering monster encounter didn’t exactly make the school look blameless, but it would probably be better than the panic and outrage when it was proven that one of the school’s non-human students had done it. Back towards the coast there would probably be a panic and furor over mermaids, but here in the midst of the woods and plains of Prax there wouldn’t be any targets for people’s worst instincts except for the other residents of Harlowe and the university itself.

But what would become of Iona and Feejee, if neither were officially implicated in Leda’s death? I doubted her family would go along with any plan that didn’t involve bringing the killer or killers to justice, but I wasn’t sure that it could be called “justice” when a representative of the Imperium stood up and read a bit of creative writing and then a “private resolution” took care of the killer.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to be right about all this or not… I supposed it would be better if the panic could be avoided and the threat of mermaid attacks ended at the same time, but for all that this might be a nice, neat solution, it didn’t feel like a clean one. If I was right, then I was really glad I’d kept my name out of things.

I turned to ask Steff what she thought of it all, only to find her staring at the TV with a look that could only be called slack-jawed wonder. Like, her jaw was literally hanging over. There was even a bit of drool in the corner of it. The image in the box was still the same close-up of Mr. Embries… I would have suspected the cameraman had wandered away, but the focus stayed on him too perfectly even when he shifted slightly.

He was really kind of handsome, in a silver fox kind of way. Kind of dashing, kind of stately, with an odd sort of presence that you could feel even through the TV… he didn’t exactly seem like Steff’s type, though.

“Steff?” I said quietly.

“Shh,” she said.

“Steff, come on, what’s the big deal? You’re drooling over this guy,” I said.

“Shh!” several other people said. I looked up and saw that everyone in the room was as transfixed by the image in the TV as Steff… and apparently the cameraman… were. I stared at Embries, wondering exactly what it was about him that demanded this much attention, but I still didn’t see it. I mean, he was handsome and well-dressed, but he was also… old.

He’d been looking slightly to the side… focusing on the podium, probably, but then his gaze slowly turned and focused on the camera, like he’d just noticed it was pointing at him. As he stared out from the screen, there were a few gasps, sighs, and even a moan from around the room. A look of irritation flashed across his face, and the image in the box flickered away, then became the static image of the fountain again.

“Uh… looks.. looks like they’re having some mystical difficulties there,” Hart said, sounding like he was just waking up. “Well, I guess we have all heard the important parts. Class… um… dis… let’s pick it up on Friday, okay?”

“Dude, who was that old guy?” La Belle said. “I kind of think I want him to eat me.”

“Oh, shut up, Keri,” one of the other front row girls said.

Next: Everybody goes to dinner like nothing happens. Or else something happens. You’ll just have to find out, won’t you?

Discuss this story on the Livejournal feed.

“Wait… I thought class didn’t start for another couple of minutes,” Keri La Belle said from her seat in the front row.

“It doesn’t,” Professor Hart replied. “Today’s lesson involved a lot of set-up, though, so I got here early.”

“But why are you talking to us if class hasn’t started yet?” she asked.

“You don’t have to pay attention until then,” he said, placing a few more goblins and then adjusting their positions.

“How do I know when I have to start paying attention?”

“When class starts,” Hart said, continuing to pull out more goblins and placing them on the relief map.

“How do I know when that is, then?” La Belle asked.

“How do you normally know?”

“When you come in and start talking,” she said. “That’s why it’s not fair for you to do that before class starts. Because then how are we supposed to know when class actually begins?”

“For point of reference, assume it starts now,” he said. He stopped placing goblins on the desk… they now outnumbered the red-clad soldiers by more than two-to-one… and gestured for the guys who were crowded around his desk to take their seats.

“But what if someone’s not…”

“If they’re not paying attention, that’s their own fault,” he said. “Now…”

“But you said…”

“Class has begun, Ms. La Belle,” Hart said. “Kindly keep your mouth in the closed position until you’ve figured out what the discussion topic is and have something to contribute on it.”

“It’s war, right?”

“Yes, war,” he said. “When you look at the history of a family, a lineage, you’re talking about a series of marriages and births, mostly. The ‘begats’, to use a classical term. Individuals contribute other accomplishments to the family legacy, but with rare exceptions we don’t divide our family history up into epochs based on when Uncle Mortimer perfected his barbecue sauce. The most compact timelines list nothing more than births, marriages, and deaths.”

For once, I hoped that La Belle would interrupt the class with an irrelevant side-note… from what I could tell, her family did mark its history from the deeds of one ancestor. I would have loved to get more detail or even just confirmation from a stray remark, but Keri appeared to have spent her annoyance charges already. She remained perversely silent.

“But when you talk about the history of a larger people, what you end up talking about most is the wars,” Hart continued. “Advances in culture, art, transportation, crafting… these things are important, yes. We characterize periods by them. But what defines those periods? How do we tell when one ends and another begins? If there’s a war, it’s easy… if there isn’t, there might not be any clear consensus on when exactly something rose or fell.”

He paused to finish laying out the goblin troops. With the caped centurions squaring off against goblins rather than human rebels, it was more apparent that he was looking backwards a bit from the time period we’d been dealing with, back before Magisterion had even arrived in the westering world.

It was an interesting choice, because Hart had bristled at administration requirements to teach material that he saw as outside the stated scope of his class. The decades leading up to the foundation of the Imperial Republic were important background for Early Republican History, but that’s what he’d always treated it as: background. The idea that he’d suddenly break out visual aids to illustrate a fight that had happened long before there was any talk of republic was a little odd.

“So, getting back to the point… a rapidly growing town conquers some of its neighbors in order to feed its expansion… a city begets a city-state,” he said. “Further conquest becomes necessary to secure resources and trade routes, as well as defense. City-state begets an empire, the empire begets colonies, and in some occasions, the colonies eventually beget their own empires. Ms. Carter, is my metaphor too sexual for your tastes?”

“Uh, no, sir,” she replied. “Too martial. What about diplomacy? Most alliances are entered into voluntarily, trade routes can be secured by treaties, weaker neighbors can choose to be absorbed by a stronger one to gain the benefits of its power… colonies can be granted independence after growing into a self-governing state. It doesn’t always have to be war.”

“You have a point, Ms. Carter,” Hart said. “But the hand of war can be felt in those interactions even when it’s not seen. War is costly and disruptive to the point that it can bring about the end of an era. The avoidance of war is a powerful motivator for weaker states and an attractive incentive for strong ones. Any negotiation between distant powers is going to be tinged by the knowledge of who is likely to win if the matter comes to blows. Any consideration made by a neighbor about the benefits of voluntary annexation is going to give weight to the cost of resistance.”

“I’ll grant that this is a useful filter for viewing history,” Carter said. “But I don’t think it’s the only one. War isn’t some elemental force that shapes everything. If anything, it’s the other way around. There are pressures… social, economic, political, cultural pressures… that cause wars.”

“Sure,” Hart said. “And marriages and births don’t just happen, either. They’re a natural culmination of a lot of other, smaller events. But they’re what gets recorded in the Family Librum and, as single events go, they have a disproportionately large impact on everything that follows them. In a way, talking about them is a way of talking about all those other, smaller events.

“History is, broadly speaking, the study of what came before. But it can’t be the study of everything that happened, for three reasons: one, not everything that’s ever happened is equally significant. Something that doesn’t have much impact on what comes next is not going to be anything more than trivia, if we even know about it at all. That brings me to point two: we don’t know and will never know all of what happened. Finally, even if we did, it would take as long to recount it as it did to happen. So when we look at history, what we are looking at is a scale model of the past: it’s reduced in size to something easier to handle, some details are lost while others become more prominent.”

He held up one of the scarlet-clad soldiers, armed with a tiny spear thing.

“Like this,” he said. “This figure stands for a pikeman… several of them, in fact… who fought under General Clayborn in the first Battle of Seven Hills, during the first Dwarf and Goblin War. All of the foot soldiers who fought in the actual Battle of Seven Hills were individuals with faces and lives . Most of them had names. We know who some of them were, in general terms. We have a few letters, at least one surviving diary. These are important primary sources. They help give us a picture of the world in which the battle took place.

“If we wanted another ‘filter’ to look through besides war, we could go personal. We could say with some certainty that this might have been one Antony Kearns, whose letters to his wife are one of the most frequently-narrated pieces of historical correspondence from the pre-Republican era. We know that he was at Seven Hills, though we don’t have his account of it… which means we don’t have even the smallest idea where he was positioned. Dwarven historians gave us extremely accurate charts of the human and goblin troop positions, but they neglected to identify which of them was the one who would eventually become noted for the correspondence he left for posterity.

“Similarly, we know that Mr. Kearns lived much of his life before his military career in Dunmere Keep, and thanks to him we have some idea what a typical day for a merchant’s son living in Dunmere was like. We don’t know enough about him to write a definitive biography… the story of his life… but we have something like the story of a typical day in his life.

“But a typical day in the life of Antony Kearns of Dunmere Keep, as fascinating as it is as part of the historical record, pales in significance in comparison to this day,” Hart said, gesturing at the desktop display with the figurine still in his hand. “This day, more than two decades before the first skirmish of what we now call Magisterion’s War, when the fight was not yet Republican versus Imperial, colonial versus colonizers… Antony Kearns was born on the other side of the ocean. The son of a loyal subject of the Unnamable One, had always counted himself such a subject. He was no militiaman… he served in the scarlet capes in his father’s stead. Antony was a young man when he fought the goblins. He was nearing forty when revolution broke out. So, what changed?

“We know almost nothing about his life in between those two points, for the simple reason that he didn’t have anyone to write to about it. He fought for the Old Empire in one war and against it in the next, serving with distinction under General Clayborn in one and against him in the other. We have some ideas as to how this came to be, we can make some broad inferences as to the rest based on what we know about the merchant class and how their grievances helped lead to the revolution,” Hart said. He put the figure down, back on the battlefield with the other pikemen. “But at this point, we’re moving away from history and into the realm of storytelling… taking what we know about an era and making up something that might have happened to an individual. The personal view is one way of looking at things, but it has its limits. History is found more often in the aggregate, in big mass movements involving lots of people… and what do you call it when you’ve got a great big mass of people all marching in the same direction?”

“A parade?” La Belle guessed.

“An army,” Hart said.

“Armies have parades. Don’t they?”

“So here we go,” he said, ignoring her. “The Battle of Seven Hils. Background: two legions, under General Clayborn, were sent into the northwest in order to help put down a goblin warband that had been massing in the region. Imperial forces were completely unprepared for the scope of the threat, as they had all but exterminated the goblins in that region less than one generation ago… one human generation. Here again you see the human inexperience with goblinoids rearing its face. Human-style reproduction can’t produce an army from a devastated population in a quarter of a century. With goblins, though, there’s no such thing as ‘almost exterminated’. If they don’t care about social niceties, education, or the survival of the mother, the population can increase tenfold in ten years.

“The goblin warriors weren’t much like the armored soldiers you see here,” Hart said, gesturing at the figurines. “Their weapons would have been cruder, their armor practically non-existent. This isn’t to say they weren’t dangerous… they were born and reared for one reason only, to fight. Their lives meant nothing to them, so death meant nothing. Their elders, the survivors of the earlier massacres, were prepared to raise a whole new generation up after them, once the threat to their survival had been dealt with.

“Here is where the goblin unfamiliarity with humans came into play. The goblins had dealt with invaders before, but they had never dealt with anything on the scale of the empire before. They had never fought a foe they couldn’t outlast with a massive band like the one they’d raised. They couldn’t conceive of armies like those of the empire, they couldn’t imagine a foe with the means and the will to carry men and material from half a world away… soldiers birthed from the womb of the empire in equal numbers to those they’d spawned.”

His whole reel about goblins sounded at least borderline offensive… I really wasn’t sure that “spawn” was the right word, given that goblinoids had sex and carried their young in much the same way that mammals did, however much the messier details differed. I also thought he was probably oversimplifying the math… from what I understood about goblin reproduction, the upper limit on multiple births wasn’t firm but was restricted by practicalities. Even dispensing with the safety of the mother it didn’t seem likely that they could get twenty or so surviving children in a brood, which is what it would take to get a tenfold increase with each mother giving birth only once.

On the other hand, if he didn’t mean each woman carrying a fatally large litter to term every time, just showing no particular regard for their health and breeding as often as possible. That could probably mean triplets or quadruplets, maybe as often as once a year. That still didn’t work out to a tenfold increase in ten years… if anything, it could be much higher. I supposed that the number of times a goblin could reproduce and survive on average would also have some impact.

It was possible that I was simply overthinking what was a convenient phrase meaning “the goblins built up their population really quickly”. A tenfold increase over a decade was doubtlessly possible, but it seemed unlikely that anybody had done an exact survey of the goblins to the northwest of the colonies before the build-up or after it.

“I’ve placed miniatures on the battlefield to represent the placement of groups of men and goblins,” Hart said. “If each human figure represents, say, about five warriors, then each goblin on the board represents fifty. The human soldiers are a detachment of the Nineteenth Legion. Though this was one of the most important engagements of what we call the Dwarf and Goblin Wars, at this point the dwarves were detached observers. They only got into the fight when the goblins entered into an alliance with kobolds. Most other engagements would also have included a number of militia men… I chose this battle in particular because it involved fewer distinct armies than most important fights from this general era. But for the Battle at Seven Hills, Clayborn took what he thought would be enough of his men to be an impressive show of force into the valley where his wizards’ familiars had seen goblins massing. Birds make for decent reconnaissance agents, but they have one weakness: they’re not so good with numbers. When they reported ’many’ goblins, Clayborn and his advisers took it to mean ’this is where the remaining goblins have gathered’.”

He pointed to a mounted figure in scarlet armor, surrounded by imperial knights and riding at the forefront of the imperial forces.

“Clayborn was no coward,” he said. “He positioned himself in battle at the frontlines when it was necessary, and behind them when it was necessary. When directing a battle, he preferred to be somewhere that he could watch things unfolding and issue orders clearly and efficiently to any part of his forces, but when leading what was a relatively small force in what was meant to be an overwhelming display of military strength and bravery, he knew the importance of sticking out his own neck.”

Hart’s eyes were on his miniatures as he spoke instead of the faces of his class, and it occurred to me that there was far less discussion than normal… he usually prompted anyone who looked like they might have something to say, whether they volunteered or not. But even those like Keri La Belle, who would speak without prompting, were watching the battlefield like they expected the metal miniatures to enact the battle for them.

“Clayborn had misjudged the situation, but he was considered one of the best military minds of the empire… hence his posting to the furthest corner of it. He adjusted quickly. He had the wizards send up signals immediately to alert the rest of the army, half a day‘s march behind them. While the general marshaled his troops into more defensive formations,” Hart said, moving the figures around to reflect this, “his aide-de-camp worked with the magicians to get reinforcements and open a line of rapid retreat. They had made no provisions for a mass teleport or gate spell… their battlefield mages were prepared more for showy spells of mass destruction, fireballs and lightning strikes… but the wizards back at the encampment had everything they needed to open a planar rift, once the battle mages relayed the message to them.

“It’s a ritual that takes hours in the best of circumstances, and they finished it in one. After the rift was open, they had a link to the rest of the army. They were able to evacuate their wounded, bring in field healers, and most importantly get the rest of their soldiers onto the field. At that point the fighting wasn’t over, but only because the goblin war band had no concept of surrender. It’s the hour between the first engagement and the opening of the rift that the events we think of as the Battle of Seven Hills took place.

“If General Clayborn had lost that day, if his men had been wiped out or he’d been slain, then history would probably remember him as an arrogant fool who marched an inferior force into an impossible situation. But because he not only survived, but held out long enough to turn disaster into victory… or into what would have happened if he’d marched his whole army across the river and into the goblin encampment… he was considered the hero of the day.”

I was reminded of Hart’s earlier insistence that history couldn’t be the study of everything in perfect detail because it would take as much time to recount as it had to happen. If he spent an entire hour long class period telling us about an hour-long battle… well, he was kind of proving his point there in a bad way.

“Clayborn did have advantages. His men were armed and they were trained. The goblins of the war band weren’t tacticians. They’d dug in in a valley ringed with hills, feeling safer in the lowlands and out of sight. Clayborn and his men had the high ground from the beginning,” Hart said, shifting the goblins around to surround the hills where the imperial soldiers were. “The war band was numerous enough to encircle the bases hills, cutting off mundane escape routes, but their best hope of victory… a suicidal mass charge… was hampered by the terrain.”

He didn’t spend the rest of the hour describing the Battle of Seven Hills, thankfully, though it seemed like there were a surprising number of “pivotal moments” in an hour-long skirmish. None of it was that interesting to me… war might have been a perfectly valid “filter” for viewing history, but it wasn’t what appealed to me. Really, I thought more credit should go to the wizards than to the fighters who asked the wizards to save their asses, after having led everybody into a fight where they were outnumbered twenty to one in the first place.

“And that’s the Battle of Seven Hills, visually speaking,” Hart said, after reaching the part where the rest of the Nineteenth Legion started pouring out of a rift. “Now, to get back to my rhetorical question from before class started: what is war good for? For historians, it’s useful for marking off eras… and for getting everybody to sit up and pay attention every once in a while. We only just touched on some of its other uses, though: securing resources, securing borders, and so on. The Dwarf and Goblin Wars were about securing the colonies from the threat of goblin attacks, and securing resources that would otherwise have been in goblin-controlled lands. The causes of Magisterion’s War have been one of our recurring topics. Here we come to the fun part. Each of you needs to pick a partner. You’ll pick a battle of the pre-Republican period, from the Goblin Wars on through Magisterion’s War. You need to make a graphic representation of that battle… it can be as simple as a detailed map, or you can go all-out with terrain and miniatures, but either way you’ll be expected to present the battle to the class and to do so in an interesting and engaging way. You’ll need to show not only the events of the battle, but also how it fits in with what happened around it… its immediate causes and its effects.

“In the case of Seven Hills, it made Clayborn’s reputation all the stronger. It made him more ruthless in dealing with goblinoids, but also more cautious. He never allowed himself to be baited after that. This proved to be frustrating to his later opponents, though it also caused him to miss several important opportunities in Magisterion’s War. I won’t be going into those now, though… I’ll be doing someone’s work for them if I do.

“You’ll have a few weeks to work on this… I’ll have the exact requirements for the assignment posted on the bulletin board in the hall before class on Wednesday,” Hart concluded, glancing at the timepiece at the back of the room. “It’ll be right next to the sign-up information for the new miniature battle club.”

Next: Another few thousand words of interior monologue as Mackenzie walks to her next class… wait, this is her last class? I guess it must be time for sex, then.

Discuss this chapter on the Livejournal community.

The instinct felt protective… Steff was more than capable of taking care of herself, under normal circumstances, but she might have still been a little wobbly. Her altered appearance could make her the target of harassment, whether from people who knew what she used to look like or just guys who noticed a surprisingly well-endowed half-elf in revealing clothes.

I realized I was picturing Steff in an outfit more like the one Amaranth had first pitched, with one of her old peasant blouses converted into a chest-hugging belly shirt… even if she had gone with that instead of a simple alteration to one of her elven-style gowns it was unlikely that she’d be showing any more skin than she would have in the garment’s previous configuration as she went out and about on a cold fall day. I’d even thought about the practical realities of such an outfit when Amaranth first brought it up… but sometimes fantasy was more interesting than reality.

But then, for all the difficulties that Steff’s reality posed, it was an intriguing fantasy all its own. Those breasts… I’d seen them… I’d even touched them, or they’d touched me… and all while Steff was as visibly hard-up as anyone with a penis could stand to be, and yet it hadn’t been sexual. The context had made that so. Steff’s exhaustion had ruled out doing anything even more exhausting. Now that it was over, though, my mind kept turning the sights and sensation over and over again. Those breasts… Steff’s breasts, fresh and new and ripe like magical fruit grown to maturity overnight. I wanted to touch them, not just feel them pressed up against my body but press my whole body up against them… well, really just my hands.

Though also my face… and my mouth, which was obviously part of my face. My lips, parted slightly as I brushed them against her smooth skin and opening as I approached her nipples to allow my tongue and teeth to experience them. And my own breasts, small as they were… I wanted to lie chest-to-chest with Steff, feel how those wonderfully protean new parts moved up against me.

And maybe also my stomach if she were to drag her chest across it as she slid down the length of… okay, so “my whole body” probably was closer to the truth than not.

Steff’s body was still Steff’s body… she was still recognizably herself and so she stirred all the same feelings that I associated with her. But there were new feelings being stirred, mixed in with the old… confusing feelings, like that protective impulse.

Amaranth was my girlfriend… that fact was so obvious that I felt ridiculous for having tried to dodge it so many times. One corner of my mind still rebelled rather noisily at the label. She was my girlfriend, and my first experience with such. I didn’t know how much truth there was to the stereotypical view of lesbian couples, where one person took on the role of the “man” or “husband”… but it didn’t apply very well to our relationship. Amaranth endeavored to be all things to all people, or at least the horny ones, but I had a feeling that butch fell somewhere outside her repertoire. I was the plain one, I was the one with the meager hips and flat chest, but I was no more of a man than she was.

And yet, we had different roles staked out. She was my owner, I was owned. She took care of me, more often and to a greater degree than I took care of her. It wasn’t a one-sided relationship… she clearly got something from me that was lacking in her other couplings, no matter how much emphatically she believed that love was at the root of all of them. But we didn’t do the same things for each other, and if either of us could be characterized as looking out for the other, she was looking out for me. To a large degree, that was how we’d got together in the first place: Amaranth saw me confused and in distress, she reached out with her warmth and her calm strength.

I didn’t have so much of the calm or the strength, emotionally speaking, but I was on more of an even keel than Steff. Was this something I could do for her, at all? Okay, Steff was a better fighter than I was, and she was also more experienced when it came to anything beyond living in a small town and having an existence bounded largely by a school, a house, and the shortest path between them. But none of that meant Steff didn’t need help, in terms of support from her friends, and maybe I was flattering myself but maybe I could be the person to give it to her.

She clearly liked Amaranth as a person aside from sexual attraction, but she didn’t seem to take her seriously. There was a sort of flippancy in her voice when she talked about Amaranth… like everything that came out of Amaranth’s mouth was exactly what someone who’d lived in a hippy farming commune her whole life would say. She wasn’t wrong in thinking that… but that didn’t mean everything that Amaranth said was wrong, either.

I was sheltered and naive in my own way, but I’d lived my life out in the same real world that Steff saw herself pitted against. I’d had similar problems. Steff seemed to listen to me, sometimes.

I wasn’t sure exactly how my presence would help… I seemed to be as likely a target for harassment as she was, and I wasn’t exactly the most capable fighter in the world. But then, Amaranth said she got a lot more attention from guys when she wasn’t with me, and despite a few ugly incidents I could usually make it from place to place without being assaulted.

Without any other clear plan, I ambled over to Smith Hall like normal. I decided to wait out in the hallway so I could have a chance to talk to Steff before we went in.

I was feeling a small stabbing pang of loss at the sense of a missed opportunity for what seemed like a bit of girlfriend-ly niceness. Sure, I could always offer to walk with her in the future, but this was a kind of a milestone, a first… though maybe she wouldn’t want it to be marked as anything momentous. It occurred to me that she might prefer not to be treated any differently.

As soon as I thought about that, I began to suspect my own motives. Steff was stirring new feelings in me… the fact that I was way more interested in her breasts now that she had them wasn’t terribly surprising, but why was I thinking about protecting her and taking care of her? Why was I suddenly interested in walking Steff to class?

Was I thinking of her as a girlfriend for the first time, just because she now had breasts and hips? What had I thought of her as before? As much as I’d been dead set on the idea that Steff was a girl when I first got to know her, had I been viewing her differently from other girls once I knew about her equipment?

I supposed there was no real way to answer that, because Steff was different from other girls.

She was an individual girl.

She didn’t conform to the archetype of “girl” perfectly in how she acted… but then, who did? She was also different to me in particular, because of how we felt about each other and how she acted towards me. Could I possibly separate out how much of the difference was because of the parts she had, how much was knowing what she wanted to do to me with them, and how much was just Steff being Steff and not someone else?

Did it even bear thinking about? If I ended up changing how I acted towards her out of a fear of treating her differently on account of the change, wasn’t that doing exactly what I was trying to avoid? On the other hand, if I didn’t think about it… well, wasn’t that the very definition of being thoughtless? Usually when I’d hurt someone I cared about or said something horribly unfair to someone, it was because I had said or done something without thinking… had I ever managed to make things worse by thinking?

It was definitely possible to miss opportunities to act while being lost in thought, but really, all the stories about wishes gone awry that the professor had alluded to came down to the same thing: people not thinking through the consequences. Even Steff, as reckless as she acted, couldn’t help but think about the implications of her changed appearance. She’d already mentioned what it would mean if she went back among the elves… but what about our classmates?

In an ideal world, nobody would notice or care… or at least they wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t make the class about Steff and their reactions to her… but we were hardly living in an ideal world. If that wasn’t preying on Steff’s mind, she’d be sure to get a rude awakening sooner or later. She could… and probably would… try to laugh it off, or brush it aside with a sharp retort, but it wasn’t something she could pretend wasn’t there.

That line of thought just made me wish I’d thought to offer to walk with her to class all over again…

It seemed like the only thing I actually could do was try not to treat her differently but be aware that her situation had changed. That wouldn’t necessarily be as easy as “just treating her like anybody else”, but she wasn’t anybody else. She was Steff.

“So, do you need a ring of free movement to get around on that plane?”

She was also there… I looked up from my reverie to see her looking down at me, grinning the most lopsided of grins. I had a second of wondering if a secondary effect of the potion had been to make her much taller, and then I realized she was wearing a pair of black boots with absurdly tall heels.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, lifting one foot and twirling it in half-circles. “I got these forever ago, but they never fit… leather alterations typically cost enough hide to make a whole ‘nother set of boots, but apparently they’re not actually that hard. I’ve always thought they just charged more for doing leather because leather stuff’s more expensive than cloth…”

“What plane?” I asked, once my brain had caught up to what she was saying.

“The one your mind disappears to all the time,” she said. She smiled. “I envision it as a sort of quasi-elemental plane of boobage.”

“‘Boobage’ isn’t even a quasi-element,” I said.

“It is,” she said.

“An element is a building block of existence,” I said. “A quasi-elemental substance is one that can fulfill the role of an element while not fulfilling the full definition of an element. Breasts aren’t a building block. You can’t make anything out of them.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Steff said. “Sometimes when I get bored I think about what I could do with certain other peoples’, if I got my hands on them… I think it could make for an interesting arts and crafts project.”

“That… that’s not even close the same,” I sputtered. I wasn’t sure why I was in full-on nerdish indignity when this was clearly far from a sagely debate for Steff. “That’s like saying paper’s an element because you can fold it into a hat!”

“You mean it’s not?” Steff said. “Anyway, boobage is definitely a quasi-element.”

“How is it a quasi-element?” I asked.

“Quasi say so, silly,” Steff said, reaching out and poking me in the nose. I groaned and rolled my eyes. “So, where were you, if not the demiplane of demitasses.”

“Isn’t that a coffee serving?” I asked.

“Is it?” Steff said. “I just picked that word up gazing at bras this afternoon. Of course, if staring at tits really builds vocabulary, you could probably narrate a dictionary.”

“Sorry,” I said, shifting my gaze to her feet instead. That seemed more sexual… my eyes might have happened to fall to rest at about chest level, but I wasn’t actually looking at her, actively. Watching her fidget in her heels, on the other hand… she seemed so lively, so full of energy, so much more present and real and there than she’d been in my bed.

“Eyes: I have them,” Steff said, touching my chin with her fingers and tipping my face upwards towards her. “So do most people, you will find.”

“Sorry… anyway, I was really just thinking,” I said, and she gave me a very eyelash-fluttery eyeroll.

“I know,” she said. “You do a lot of that… does it ever do any good?”

“After considerable thought,” I said, and she favored me with another roll, “I’ve concluded that it beats the alternative.”

“So, you never wish you could just turn off your brain?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, there are particular thoughts I’d maybe like to be able to pull out of general circulation… but if I try to shut my brain down all that does is let them roam around without any competition. Even with everything that’s happened, I don’t know how much different I’d be from how I was when I first got here if I didn’t take time to, you know, process everything. I’d just be reacting all the time.”

“I don’t know if that’s a bad thing,” Steff said. “Your reactions can be pretty hot… I mean, it’s cute when you get worked up over nothing, but the way you blush, the way you squirm… you know, I think I’m going to miss those things if you ever decide to be fearless.”

“Not likely,” I said. I could feel my cheeks heat up from the attention, and I could feel my pulse quickening at the thought of the times Steff had me squirm… holding me down, lying on top of me… I was the one with the predatory blood, but when we’d fooled around on the edges of the woods my body had reacted like she was the hunter and I was the prey.

Probably with good reason… now that the nerd rage had subsided, I kind of wondered what she’d meant exactly by the “arts and crafts” remark earlier, though not nearly enough to ask her to clarify.

“So?” she said.

“So, what?”

“So… what were you thinking about?”

“You, mostly,” I said, blushing… my eyes started to slip away from her face, but stopped when I saw she was blushing, too. “What?” I said.

“I’m never sure how much you actually like me,” she said. “And how much of it is just that I’m here and I’m putting myself in front of you.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Sure I’m joking, Mack,” she said. “People frequently joke about being insecure when they’re not. It’s universally regarded as comedy gold… you know, much like sarcasm.”

“Steff… you’re like pure sex,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“I’m not pure anything, hon,” she said. “Oh, sure, I sound pretty good on paper… if I describe myself right I can cram in about six different kinds of ‘exotic’… but so can you, and with a slightly different description, we’re both maladjusted freaks, and underneath that all, or so the story goes, we’re both just people, and most people have doubts and can’t read minds. So, yeah, I’m serious about the not knowing.”

“I like you,” I said. “I want you. In fact, before you got here I was thinking about asking to walk you to class.”

“Hmm… okay,” she said.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, you can walk me to class,” she said. I stared at her in disbelief, and she sniffed and scuffed the tile with the toe of her boot. “Unless you don’t care to be seen with me…”

I glanced over towards the door, just a little ways down the hall… Steff could probably have crossed the distance in three or four long strides.

“What, all the way over there?” I asked.

“Well, you shouldn’t have offered if you didn’t want do it,” she said.

“What? I wasn’t offering…” I said, but my attempt to clarify died when I saw Steff’s face falling like a gelatin mold that had been left out in the sun. My heart was crushed for the half second that it took me to realize she was fucking with me, and then I was kind of pissed off for the few seconds it took me to realize that she was also offering me a chance to salvage my missed gesture. Or maybe she was taking the chance to enjoy it for herself… I wasn’t sure what the difference was, or if it was important, so long as we both enjoyed it.

I held out my hand and she took it, and we walked into the classroom. I was focused on the feel of Steff’s hand in mine… warm and vital… that I didn’t register the activity at the front of the room until we were halfway down the aisle to our seat.

Professor Hart was already present. He had laid out across his desk… and across part of a folding table he’d placed alongside it… an elaborate battle field with hills and trees and miniature soldiers, much like the ones that Shiel used in her game. Several of the guys in the class, who rarely seemed fully engaged with the class, were standing around watching as Hart placed more troops on the field.

The figures that Hart used were painted metal, and larger than the ones that Shiel carved. All the ones he’d placed so far were wearing capes dyed imperial scarlet… the legions of the Old Empire. War history was not my best area, but if the landscape was supposed to represent any of the battles of Magisterion’s War then it was either a minor one or else the set-up was pretty abstract.

“Oh, wow,” Steff said.

“Good evening, class,” Professor Hart said, looking up. He had a grin on his face that was so avid it was almost avaricious. “For those of you just coming in, our topic today is going to be ‘War: What Is It Good For?‘ You’ll want to get a notebook out, because this could get extensive.”

Next: Hart’s War.

Discuss this chapter on the Livejournal community.

Hey! In case you haven’t seen the website since before last Wednesday, you’re probably noticing some subtle changes. Note that some things aren’t quite finished… some parts of the design are smoother than others. If you’d like to leave feedback on it, there’s a post before this one devoted to that.

Also, the smug sneer faltered a little bit when she saw my face… I wondered what kind of response she’d been expecting. Mild confusion apparently wasn’t it.

Sooni put her stuff down neatly on her desk and then came swishing back to talk to me, as she so often did… she looked so very pleased with herself that I felt a resurgence of dread. Maybe Maliko’s seeming disappointment had been premature.

“Hello, Sooni,” I said,

“Hello, Miss Mackenzie,” she said, beaming. “You know… the Veil Ball is tonight.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“I understand it is a masquerade,” she said.

“Yeah…”

“I was wondering if you had a costume prepared for it.”

Oh, here we go, I thought. It was obvious that she’d decided that I had to go to the party with her and she’s come up with some ridiculous, borderline festishy outfit she expects me to wear.

“Actually… um… I’m going with Ian, and he’s working on a costume for me,” I said, bracing myself for the temper tantrum.

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “I put the finishing touches on mine this morning and thought I would see if you needed any help with alterations or anything for yours. Are you going as Annie?”

“Uh… actually, I thought about doing a Mecknights costume, but I wasn’t sure how to do it,” I said.

“Oh. Well, you should have asked me,” she said, but she sounded hardly even reproachful. “I would have been happy to help you.”

“Uh huh,” I said, still not at all sure where she was going with this… was she going to ask me a favor?

“I guess I’ll see you at the dance!” she said as the professor came into the room. She turned and hurried back to her desk, where the whipping of her fox tail and forth caused the girl behind her to scoot way back.

“Settle down,” the professor said in response to the legs of the chair squeaking against the tiles. “Now, will everybody who looked up the extra credit questions please pass them forward and we’ll be moving on.”

Extra credit questions? What extra credit questions? Maliko threw a glance over her shoulder at me as she handed a paper forward, and I dimly remembered having been in a momentary panic after the last class, when I’d realized I’d missed a good deal of the lecture. Maliko had tried to taunt me by telling me I’d missed hearing about a huge, grade-critical assignment… well, I’d showed her by forgetting all about it.

Two wrongs might not make a right, but under certain circumstances two absentmindednesses could.

On the other hand, though, I had missed out on some extra credit. Even if Maliko hadn’t manage to drive me into a blind panic for the past two days, I’d still managed to screw myself a bit. I paid close attention throughout the remainder of the period, even though it wasn’t particularly interesting material… we were just dealing with conditional statements, and the inverses, converses, and contrapositives thereof. It was important to have a firm grasp on those things when dealing with certain kinds of magic… and more particularly certain kinds of beings… but it didn’t have a lot of direct application for an enchanter.

Unless I was going to put a lot of limiting effects on my work, I probably wouldn’t use it that much, and the essence of applied enchantment was making things that were useful, not bound up by a lot of arbitrary conditions. The bottom line was that there just wasn’t much of a market for televisions that only worked if a thrice-married virgin laid a golden egg in a month with seven Sundays, or whatever. In olden times, being able to sort your way through those kinds of riddles had been an important skill for enchanters, because almost nobody had the kind of power and understanding you needed to make a truly permanent enchantment, so they’d done the best they could.

When class ended, I reminded myself that Ian had told me to look at the name of the history building. I knew of at least one current professor who was a Smith, in the delving program, but it was such a common name there was no reason to think he was any relation to the one who the building was named for. But if he wasn’t, why had Ian thought I’d find the name significant?

I started to get irritated with him, that he hadn’t just told me what he was getting at… but not so irritated that I forgot to look. Almost that irritated, but not quite. I stopped at the last moment before walking underneath the arch and looked up. In the moment before the person behind me slammed into my back and pushed me forward, I read the name: Ian H. Smith Hall.

Oh.

“Learn how to walk,” the girl who’d shoved into me said, blowing past me as I started forward again.

Either Ian just thought it was really super neat that a building had the same first name as he did, or there was a story there.

I kind of wondered if Hart was going to say something about Steff’s continued absence, but he didn’t… he just jumped right into the lesson.

“Last time we were talking about the goblin situation, in the wetlands north of Ravenport,” he said. “The first direct contact between the Empire and goblinoids, and it seemed to be going great: the locals went nuts over relatively cheap trinkets and common foodstuffs that they’d never seen before, and the envoys of the Unnamable One were making all kinds of impressive diplomatic breakthroughs. Of course, the whole thing was predicated on the kind of misconceptions that we outlined on Wednesday…”

“What kind of misconceptions?” Ms. La Belle asked. I heard Ms. Carter swearing not quite under her breath.

“The ones we went over last class,” Hart said.

“But what do you mean, ‘the kind of misconceptions’?”

“Misunderstandings about how goblin society is arranged, confusion about the level of political organization, a tendency to draw inferences from the very unrelated orcish society…”

“No, I remember all that… but what kind of misconceptions were they?” Ms. La Belle asked.

“Chocolate,” Hart said. “The breaking point came when, in order to secure the driest route for the emperor’s new highway, they ‘purchased’ the land being occupied by several disparate family groups from an unrelated goblin village they had established good relations with. Some people say that goblins had no concept of property before humans came. That’s probably not quite true, but they certainly didn’t have this kind of commerce, where land changes hands based on the movement of metal coins and papers. What happened from the point of view of the empire’s allies is their friends offered to evict some of their enemies from the region and pay them for it, and that seemed like a good deal. Those whose land had been ‘sold’ had no say in the deal, and probably weren’t even aware of it until the legionnaires showed up to evict them… and that was the end of any peace between humans and goblins in the region of Ravenport. Two more legions had to be sent south to defend the colony, with its valuable diamond mines… a small but significant weakening of the imperial forces in the north.”

“Wait, that doesn’t make any sense,” La Belle said. “Chocolate misconceptions?”

“Now, in the northern colonies, the settlers on what was then the western frontier had already had their own clashes with goblins, and in some cases they had even learned how to get along peacefully,” Hart said. “The dwarves of the Westering Lands had also been dealing with goblins… they weren’t fond of each other, but at the very least the dwarves were a potential source of information for relatively new arrivals. The Empire’s experience with dwarves back in the motherlands was that they were politically neutral unless threatened… the conventional wisdom was that the only way to get a military alliance with them was to hope your enemies got stupid and attacked them first. So, the official position was to avoid, avoid, avoid. If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed a possible option that the empire had overlooked, a bit of leverage they had that they could have used to gain favorable relations with the dwarves. Can anybody guess what that is?”

A few people raised their hands, including myself and Ms. Carter. Hart called on me.

“Diamonds,” I said. “Ravenport’s not near any dwarven kingdoms, so they probably didn’t even know about the deposits.”

“That is correct,” Hart said. “And the mines of Ravenport are some of the richest diamond mines in the Westering Lands. The dwarves in the north and the west mine iron and precious metals extensively, but they’ve always had to trade for most of their precious stones. Before humans established a transoceanic trade, this meant using treacherous trade routes through the northern ice reaches or with underground kingdoms, with frequent interference from kobolds. Selling diamonds to the dwarves… or even selling a share in the mines outright… would have been a very canny move for the empire. Would anybody care to speculate about why the Unnamable Emperor wouldn’t have explored that option?”

“He didn’t like dwarves?” La Belle said, without waiting to be called on.

“Astonishingly enough, that’s almost correct… the emperor might not have had any particular antipathy towards dwarves, but he was accustomed to signing trade agreements that were more like treaties, where smaller groups agreed to become his subjects, de facto or otherwise, in exchange for his beneficence. He did not like to deal with other races who could deal with him from a position of strength, who would not cede their own rights in exchange for the comfort and security of the Pax, who could not be assimilated into the empire. He would not deal with dwarven kings as kings, and he knew better than to expect them to deal with him as anything else. What else? Ms. Carter?”

“He was keeping with his policy of exporting all the wealth from the colonies,” she said. “Or importing it, from his point of view. But he wasn’t viewing the situation in the Westering Lands as being an actual economy so much as one big extended workhouse where citizens of the empire could toil for his benefit.”

“Ouch. Are you writing a pamphlet, Ms. Carter? I almost hate to tell you we already won that war,” Hart said. “But, yes, essentially. The output of the Ravenport mines was already accounted for in the emperor’s plans… whether he even considered the option of dealing with the dwarves and rejected it, or it never even crossed his mind, we don’t know.”

“Then why are we talking about it?” La Belle asked.

“Because, Ms. La Belle, to understand why things ended up the way they did, it can be instructive to look at how they might have gone instead,” Hart said. “There has been some interesting supposition about how differently things might have turned out if he had made that decision… the colonists had been trading with the dwarves on a limited basis from the beginning, but they wouldn’t have been able to match his offer. It’s doubtful that Magisterion could have won as many dwarves to his cause if the emperor was careful to spread the wealth around equally. The legions wouldn’t have been as hard-pressed in dealing with the goblins. The dwarves might have viewed any uprising that interfered with the diamond trade as a hostile action against themselves. It’s hard to imagine the revolution going the way it did, under those circumstances.”

The brief exploration of alternate history interested me on the usual geeky level, but the whole thing actually piqued my interest in another way… it was, as Hart had said, hard to imagine the old empire losing control of the colonies if they hadn’t so badly misjudged the situation with the races that were native to the area. The Unnamable Emperor probably could have mistreated his own people all he’d wanted if he’d sounded out the dwarves a little better, or sent people who displayed a little more intellectual curiosity about the funny green people in the south… really, there was no benefit to not doing a little homework when it came to those sorts of things.

Was it just laziness? Or xenophobia?

Goblins could certainly come off as creepy to mammalian races… though it was probably mutual… and dwarven secrecy had to be off-putting to someone who was trying to make up their own mind about how far to trust them. But were those things any kind of real excuse for someone who was trying to oversee an ocean-straddling empire made of many cultures and multiple races? Did “creepiness” really explain a bunch of career politicians and tacticians botching things so badly?

Or maybe the underlying lesson wasn’t one about racial tolerance at all… maybe it had just been the same arrogance that had made the emperor think the human colonists would just roll over for him, too.

Or maybe it was both… maybe it took that kind of arrogance to look at a continent populated with diverse peoples and think you could treat it as a blank slate, with only the people you’d placed there yourself counting for anything.

“Ms. Mackenzie, I’m losing you again, aren’t I?” Hart said. “Or have you been overcome with some kind of brilliant revelation?”

“I… I was just thinking about what you said,” I said.

“About the rum excise?”

“Um… before that,” I said. “About the dwarves and the goblins.”

“I’m all ears,” he said.

“I… um… there’s no benefit in ignoring another race that’s living somewhere you have interests,” I said.

“Yes, that was kind of the point.”

“Well, no, you were talking about all the benefits the emperor could have gained from dealing with the dwarves,” I said. “What I’m saying is that not only did he ignore those, but he did it for nothing… there was no rational benefit to ignoring them, there was no rational benefit to not taking the time to figure out the goblins, especially when the imperial legions started out on good terms with them. Their road north wasn’t going to be finished any time soon no matter what they did, so they had every opportunity to learn about the goblin culture, to sit down and ask the goblins about their culture, but they didn’t. It’s senseless… stupid and senseless.”

“Everybody write that down,” Hart said. “Humans did something stupid and senseless.”

“How man S-es are in ‘senseless’?” La Belle asked.

“Just the one, but it gets reused,” Hart said. “In all seriousness, though, you’re right, Ms. Mackenzie: it was downright boneheaded. It was one in a series of boneheaded moves that the empire made at its peak. This might seem counterintuitive, but there’s a reason the peak of any civilization is the peak, and it’s not because of the build up that comes before it… it’s the sharp decline that happens afterwards. Of course, no world power got to be where it is by being stupid… but once it gets there, it’s big enough and powerful enough that it can survive a few mistakes. This almost always results in making more mistakes. Why not? The first few weren’t so terrible. The damage from them may not even show up as damage immediately, but they start to stack up, and sooner or later the effects are going to be felt… the emperor might have been able to quash the rebellion with the help of the dwarves and with cooperation from the goblins, but the rebellion was a historical inevitability long before that point, because of his earlier missteps in dealing with the provincials… missteps that were still ongoing even as the open revolt spread. Which brings us back to the rum excise, which was an attempt to levy funds to suppress the northern rebellion by further taxes on the island holdings…”

I tried not to get too lost in the chain of thought as the class went on, but it was hard for me not to see the mistakes of the Unnamable Emperor being repeated in modern society, at both personal and institutional levels. The IRM in general and Magisterius University in particular both prided themselves on being racially inclusive, but in both cases the actual level of inclusiveness was very dependent on the other races’ willingness to assimilate in certain ways and to stay in their places in others. We were all thrown into the same holding area, even though we didn’t necessarily have any more in common than the old world orcs had with goblins.

It was stupid and senseless… and it wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine it ending as badly for the university as the policies of the emperor had ended for the old empire.

Discuss this story.

There was a resource annex attached near the entrance of the building, so I decided to gaze and see if there was anything like a lesson plan available on the ethernet. I didn’t see an autoscribe… just three old, small, and not particularly clear-looking crystal balls… but I figured that if I knew I could get the assignment details off the ethernet then I wouldn’t have to go around begging Sooni for them.

The good news was that it didn’t take me long to explore the entire weave presence of the logic program. The bad news was that was because there wasn’t much of one. The only thing for my class was a copy of the syllabus that had been dropped into the ether. To my immense irritation, it didn’t say one word about this giant project the professor had just dumped on us. That seemed really, really irresponsible of him…

But of course, I was being hypocritical. I was the irresponsible one… or at least, if I’d been paying attention, it wouldn’t matter how irresponsible he was.

Well, there was nothing to do but suck it up and ask Sooni. We were still friends, as much as we ever had been. She probably wouldn’t make it difficult on purpose.

Of course, when you were as good at something as Sooni was at being difficult, you could do it pretty effortlessly, even without trying.

It was either go to Sooni or admit to the teacher that I’d spaced off his entire class, though… and I had enough enemies among the faculty. Even Professor Hart, who didn’t appear to have anything against my heritage, had treated me like some kind of troublemaker in our last class.

Luckily, paying attention to him was no chore… he didn’t exactly command attention so much as demand it, but it got the job done, and the subject matter was engrossing. Steff’s absence was a little distracting because it was a reminder of her condition, but it wasn’t a surprise and so I wasn’t too worried.

“So far, we’ve been confining our attention to the upper half of the eastern seaboard,” the professor said to kick things off. “That is where the Imperial Republic was born. To get the full scope of the political landscape, we need to have an understanding of what was going on in the rest of the provinces. If Magisterion was the father of our Imperium, Rufus Vale, governor of Ravenport, was the alcoholic uncle. Ravenport, unlike Phalen, was a penal colony…”

He stopped and looked at La Belle, who just stared back at him for several seconds before saying, “I know what it means.”

“Okay,” he said. “It was a penal colony…”

“But it’s funny because it sounds like penis, right?” she added.

“Yes. Thank you, Ms. La Belle,” he said. “Ravenport was a penal colony. We sometimes call this a prison colony, but back in those days, ‘prison’ was just where they kept you until they figured out what to do with you. You either paid for what you’d done, you were executed, or you were transported… exiled for life to do a term of hard labor in a foreign province and then live out the rest of your life in obscurity, far from the illumination cast by the Mother City. Penal transportation…”

La Belle snerked. Hart glared.

“It gets funnier the more you say it,” she said.

“Transportation was used to a limited degree in Phalen and the other provinces, with persons convicted of minor offenses sent to work as domestic servants in the houses of the good and the great. Hardened criminals and political radicals were sent to harsher locales, where they could do such dangerous and/or back-breaking labor as mining, draining swamps, and working plantation-style farms. Ravenport was one such place. Swampy, sub-tropical, infested with giant lizards and mosquitoes and stirges, surrounded by goblins… yes, Ms. La Belle?”

“Are we going to learn about the goblins?” she asked.

“I’m going to teach about goblins,” Hart said. “Whether or not you learn about them is your own prerogative.”

“Okay, but if I do learn about them, can I use them for my stupid paper thing?”

“Your ‘stupid paper thing’ is about goblins of the plains,” Hart said. “Ravenport is, as I described, a swampy, low-lying region on the eastern seaboard.”

“But the goblins are going to basically be the same,” La Belle said. “I mean, I can just say ‘the goblins around Prax’ instead of ‘the goblins around Ravenport’ and it would be basically right, right?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” the professor said. “You go explain to the dean how Ravenport is basically the same thing as Prax and so I’ve already basically done my unit on local history, basically, and you can write your paper about anything you want.”

“So… that’s a no?” she asked.

“That is a no.”

“Then I don’t think I’m going to learn that much,” she said.

“In my idle moments, Ms. La Belle, I calculate how much of my monthly salary comes from your tuition,” he said. “Invariably, I conclude that both of us are being ripped off.”

“Not me, I have a scholarship,” she said.

“Archons and aspects of fate defend us,” he said. “Now, Rufus Vale was the governor of Ravenport and that meant he was the first, last, and only authority over the province. Unlike the situation in Phalen and the other northern territories that were settled by willing immigrants, including some educated and important people, the residents of Ravenport could not take an appeal to the Unnameable Emperor on their own. They had to go through Rufus. If it seems like the provincials’ complaints often fell on deaf ears, try to imagine how often the transportees’ petitions even made it to those ears.

“In theory, every man sent to Ravenport owed the crown a certain number of years of work, after which they were granted some limited freedoms and allowed to make a life for themselves. In practice, only the governor himself could sign the certificate of permission required for a release from the work camps. With no court of appeals to turn to, the colonists were effectively slaves, and he squeezed as much work out of each of them as he could before he cut them loose. Those who were released had to agree to pay special ‘taxes’ directly to him.

“Rufus also pinched every penny that came into the colony, enriching himself by shorting the convicts on their rations of such things as imported grain, potions, blankets, and other ‘luxuries’. This sort of thing was quietly tolerated… expected even… though few men did it with such aplomb as Governor Rufus Vale did. Where he really went above and beyond, though, was in skimming off the top of the income the colony generated. At about the same time the Unnameable Emperor was trying to siphon every last bit of gold and silver from the economies of the northern colonies with the Coin Act, Rufus was overseeing three enormously profitable diamond mines and pocketing most of the profits.

“The Unnameable One would have got around to dealing with him eventually, but he regarded the situation in the north as far graver. One noble vassal stealing millions wasn’t as dangerous as a bunch of riffraff who asserted their rights as individuals. The former was simply someone who had overreached himself… the latter were something new and dangerous. The empire could withstand many crimes, but not open defiance. Rufus was canny enough to know that when the northern provinces had been thoroughly re-subjugated, he’d be next. His crimes were far past the point where he could have offered any sort of penance, so he did the next most logical thing: he became a patriot.”

This was mostly new material to me. Prior to high school, all talk of Magisterion’s War and of the Westering Colonies before the new Imperium had been confined to the northeast. In high school, there’d been maybe a paragraph or two on each of the provinces and a mention that funding for the war effort and material support had come from Ravenport. The textbook had called it a “prison colony” and left it at that.

Professor Hart went into a lot more detail about what that aid had entailed… from quiet, deniable words of encouragement to keep the revolutionary spirit alive to eventual shipments of money, and then arms the governor confiscated from the legion garrison when it became impossible to hide his complicity in the growing uprising.

He eventually came to a messy ending, Hart told us, when he tried to get the colony’s inmates to fight in his defense as Imperial troops landed on the shores.

“He told them to remember how terribly they’d suffered under the Unnameable One’s yoke,” he said. “And some of them listened, but enough of them remembered the Emperor’s men promising them a fair deal in the new lands and then suffering under his yoke. He was executed on the scaffold where he himself had overseen many executions, and the province was presented to the Imperial Legion as a gift by transportees eager to affirm their loyalty to the Mother Isles.

“Here’s where the Imperial Command proved itself to be as stupid as Rufus. Rather than accepting and rewarding this show of loyalty by granting the bondsmen their freedom, or even just re-establishing the garrison and letting them return to their state of toil under a new Governor who could hardly have failed to be accepted as an improvement, they subjected the ‘rebels’ to decimation and then put them to work fortifying the province and building roads north. Ravenport was over a thousand miles away from the hotbed of revolutionary activity around Phalen… a thousand miles of swamp and forest and mountain… but they treated it as though it was a foothold from which they could launch campaigns.

“This was what you did with a rebellious population, in the old empire: you executed a bunch of them and then you worked them so hard that they didn’t have the energy to rebel any more. It didn’t hurt that the commanders were able to send word home that they’d scored a decisive victory and subjugated a rebel colony instead of one saying that the problem was resolved before their feet were even on the ground. The problem was that however hard they were working the enslaved colonists, Rufus had worked them harder. Where before they’d held out hope that somebody in the Empire would hear of his abuses somehow and grant them relief, now they had no hope. As a result, the 8th, the 11th, and the 27th Legions all ended up permanently stationed in Ravenport, to help maintain order, and played no further part in the struggles to the north.”

Here was where he got back to the goblins that La Belle had been so very briefly interested in. They had clashed with the garrison, and there had been raids back and forth, but no lasting conflict until three legions were settled there with no mission but to maintain control.

“A bunch of strange little creatures lurking in the woods, all sharp-toothed and green-skinned, was judged to be an obstacle to control,” Hart said. “The goblins were judged to be intelligent, and fortunately for them, the policy of the empire was to annex rather than exterminate. The legionnaires began a campaign of pacifying and civilizing the goblins. This, I remind you, while a thousand miles up the coast, their empire was at war.

“There were some missteps in this campaign. The range of races we call ‘goblinoids’ were unknown in the old lands. Imperial Command based its policy on dealing with the goblins on its experience with orcs, assuming the newly discovered creatures to simply be a new variety of orc. The orcs were known to have a sharply defined division of labor among the sexes. The men are warriors and hunters, but the women are in charge of domestic affairs. That’s not just an atrocious pun… women make all the important decisions at the family level since they remained with the camp while the men are away, and political power for each village is vested in its oldest citizens, most of whom are female.

“The goblins kept their women at home while the men fought, but that’s where the similarities to orcs ends. They were territorial and entrenched, rather than nomadic. Goblin women held little power. They certainly didn’t live to be respected elders very often. Before modern healing magic became commonly available to them, carrying a litter of little goblins to term carried a fifty percent mortality rate. The rate for the infants’ first year of life was close to eighty or ninety. The only old goblin women were old maids.”

“Why did so many of them die?” La Belle asked.

“That’s beyond the scope of our discussion,” Hart said. “But I look forward to hearing about it when you give your presentation. The point is that when the legions tried diplomacy, they went about it all wrong… they gave tribute and sought audience with the goblin women, thinking that they would then counsel their husbands towards peace. If hobgoblins were present, the envoys deferred to them as they would have to an unusually big and strong orc warrior, not realizing the low position hobgoblins occupied in goblin society.

“They assumed bonds of tribal loyalty existed that went beyond the immediate family groups. If they saw similar markings outside two villages, they thought that meant that they were affiliated… never dreaming that the goblins had a written script, and that seeing one identical squiggle in the midst of other squiggles signified no more of a relationship than I have to Ms. Carter since we both have an ‘a’ in our last names.”

“I have an ‘a’ in my last name, too,” La Belle pointed out.

“Cherish it,” Hart said. “It may be the only one you ever get.”

“Professor,” Ms. Carter said, raising her hand slightly. “I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Didn’t they notice that the female goblins were slaves?” she asked.

I wondered where she was getting that from… Hart hadn’t mentioned it, and while Shiel had made it clear that women were an underclass in kobold society at least, the sad truth was that most races had a history of giving women the short end of the stick.

“Well, that’s a bit of a controversial point,” he said, sounding like he knew exactly what she was talking about. “It’s true that goblin women… married goblin women, and sometimes unmarried ones depending on whether their parents considered them ‘on the market’… wore chains, but this is arguably a symbolic submission. It’s been said to symbolize a connection rather than bondage.”

I remembered Oru’s weird necklace that she had worn to the dance, a heavy chain with a fake lock on it. Was that what they were talking about? If so, it seemed like I’d misjudged her… if she had that kind of a pre-existing commitment with Moeli, than he was kind of a jerk for blowing her off and it was really no wonder she was so angry with me. Not that it was my fault, exactly, but I could see how…

“Ms. Mackenzie,” Hart said.

“What?”

“Your insights are sometimes interesting,” he said. “Would you like to share whatever’s so engrossing with the rest of the class?”

“Um… it’s not really an insight,” I said. “But… so,” I stumbled on, acutely aware of how air-headed and La Belle-like I must have sounded, “if a goblin is wearing a chain around her neck, that’s a symbol of commitment?”

I might as well get confirmation before taking this particular sin of the world upon my shoulders, I figured.

“I’m not a professor of goblinoid studies,” Hart said. “But I believe in modern goblin life, that would be analogous to a promise ring or an engagement ring. However, I’ll stress that again: modern goblin life. Not Early Republican Historical goblin life. At that time, goblin women were chained by their husbands in a variety of different fashions, some of them quite elaborate. This is completely outside the scope of our material, but if you’re really interested, I’m sure you can find pictures of the various configurations online. Some of them won’t even ask you for a charged card to view them.”

“But I can’t imagine the legion’s envoys stopped to ask about the symbolism,” Ms. Carter said.

“Here we see the awful power of a preconceived notion. Having identified the goblins as being ’small orcs’, I wouldn’t imagine they stopped to inquire about much,” Hart said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have made so many mistakes.”

“Didn‘t they find it odd that the domestic decision-makers were chained up?” Carter asked.

“According to a contemporary account, at the first meeting between a presumed goblin dignitary and a legion envoy, the envoy asked the goblin what the chains around the torso of the goblin serving them meant,” Hart explained. “When he was informed that it meant she was the goblin’s wife, he immediately started paying attention to her. His side misunderstood the mirth this produced in the assembled goblins, and thought they’d simply made a smashing diplomatic success.

“It didn’t take long for word to spread that the way to get neat presents and a funny show out of the tall pink things was to trot out your wife or your burliest houseboy, and the Imperial Legions gained a reputation as being soft-headed, harmless buffoons… it was a comedy of errors that would end very tragically for the goblins of Ravenport Province. Yes, Ms. Carter?”

“Didn’t you say that the goblins had been sparring with the imperial garrison for years?” she asked.

“I did,” he said, nodding. “They had. But the garrison soldiers were considered untrustworthy and had all been sent to less sensitive postings or discharged and returned home, taking their valuable experience in dealing with the natives with them. The goblins had never seen anything like the regalia of the Legion before, and if the humans made the mistake of thinking they were dealing with a familiar kind of creature, the goblins assumed this was some new sort of being that had come on their domain, trounced their former enemies, and then proceeded to give them gifts of clothing and herbs and alcohol while putting on hilarious entertainments. The goblins had no fear of the Legion.

And that’s where we’re going to leave off for next time.”

Discuss this story.

Of course, even if she found them, looked at them, and then stacked them neatly on my desk, I doubted it would change her reaction to later being presented with them as presents. It wouldn’t occur to her that they might be intended for her. Still, I had a very Two-like urge to do the thing properly… it would ruin the surprise for me if she saw them first.

Sooni didn’t have anything to say to me in Logic class for once, though she seemed to be in a good mood judging from the smile on her face and the way her fox tail was bouncing around. It kept moving around even after she sat down. I could hear it slapping the knees of the girl behind her, who tried to get her attention a few times.

“Hey, do you mind?” she said when Sooni finally turned around.

“Um… no?” Sooni said, confused but still smiling. “I don’t mind a bit.”

The girl scooted her desk back several inches.

The next period, I thought Steff was going to skip again… it seemed to me like if she did show up for history, she got there ahead of me. She came in a few minutes after I’d sat down, though.

“Here you go, my dear,” she said, laying an envelope in front of me with a theatrical bit of flourish. My name was written on it in ornately flowing silver letters.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Your pass into the most exclusive event of the school year,” she said. “Don’t tell me you forgot about Two’s Day?”

“Oh! I didn’t… I forgot you were doing invitations for it.”

I opened it up to see she’d hand-lettered the whole thing on some fancy card-stock, with letters that looked vaguely runic. The whole thing was way better than I could have done with an autoscribe.

“Yeah, I know we had also talked about you doing them, too,” Steff said. “I hope you didn’t go to a lot of trouble… I don’t think they turned out so well, but Amaranth kind of arm-wrestled me into doing them.” She grinned. “Only we didn’t use our arms so much and I kind of lost on purpose.”

“So what did you get her?” I asked.

“Well… I didn’t know how much money we were spending,” she said. “And I didn’t have a lot anyway, so… I kind of made her something.”

“What?” I asked.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a box of cards. On the front she’d drawn a logo that said “TWO’s Deck of Many Orders”.

“You know, we haven’t had to give her many orders lately, which is good, I guess… but I thought, what if she misses it?” Steff said. “So if she gets bored or wants a quick fix, she can pull these out and draw one.”

I pulled a few cards out. They each had an instruction on it, along with a beautifully and realistically rendered pen-and-ink illustration of Two undertaking them. The top one said “Eat A Pickle*” The next two read “Count To Ten*” and “Hug A Friend*”. They each had a little coda in a box under the picture that read, “*If you cannot do this right now, draw another card.”

“The drawings aren’t any… um… well, they get the idea across, anyway, and I tried to make sure the instructions were things that would be easy to do,” Steff said. “But I put the fine print since, you know, she might not have a pickle or a friend handy.”

“That’s creative,” I said. “I got her activity books, kind of for the same reason… but this is a lot more personal. Oh, and a cookbook.”

The cookbook was actually the biggest part of it, in terms of price, but it had been a last-minute impulse.

“Yeah, I’m sure she’ll enjoy that,” Steff said. Her entire body went rigid as she suddenly arched her back and stamped her feet rapidly on the floor. I would have been alarmed if she hadn’t been smiling… okay, I was actually still a little alarmed. But I figured it was the same impulse that made Sooni’s tail wag, absent a tail to properly express it. “Oh, I’m so excited! I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.”

“Well, you’ll have to,” I said, smiling. “You already put it in my planner.”

“Yeah, and passed out invitations,” Steff said. “Oh, well… hey, Keridwen! How’s it going?” she yelled as Keri La Belle came in with the cluster of people who sat around her. They all looked over at Steff, bemused, while La Belle tried to pretend she hadn’t heard.

They were some of the last students to arrive before Hart came in, looking like the storm that had hit campus on Saturday.

“Good afternoon, class,” he said. “I would like to share with you an amusing joke.” Strangely, he didn’t sound terribly amused. “It was told to me by my colleague Phyllis Dorman. Do any of you know Professor Dorman? She teaches History 109. ‘History of the Enias Valley’. She received this funny, funny message in her inbox this morning from the Dean of the College of History and Lore. It goes like this… because the university gets a grant from the province to encourage an interest in all things relating to the province of Prax, all history classes are required to designate a day for the teaching of local history as it relates to their subject matter. All history courses. Now, the funny part: this notice was left in her slot because it has come to the Dean’s attention that she’s not fulfilling the requirement, and she should take steps to rectify this immediately.”

“Um… isn’t her whole class local history?” La Belle asked.

“Ah, see? Do you see there?” Hart said. He sounded like he was on the verge of hysterical screaming. “Ms. La Belle gets the joke! Points for you, Ms. La Belle!”

“How many p…”

“Stop talking,” Hart said. “It gets funnier. She shared the joke with me this morning when we bumped into each other at the coffee maker, but when I got to my office and checked my mail slot, the dean had left the same funny message for me. Isn’t that hilarious?”

It was obvious Professor Hart resented the dean directing him on what to do with his class even for a single day, but I thought his reaction was a little overblown. A local history teacher being told she needs to devote a day to local history was enough to make anybody introduce their forehead to their desk. But even if Prax hadn’t joined the Imperial Republic until the mid-second century, that didn’t mean it didn’t have history… and if the surviving structures in and beneath downtown Enwich were any indication, that history was interesting.

Anyway, it seemed kind of petty to not want to give up even a single hour of class time for something that was so closely related to what you were already teaching.

Hart’s eyes were sweeping over the room. They locked on my face and from the way they narrowed I knew my expression was saying too much, as usual.

“Yes, Ms. Mackenzie,” he said. “You have a thought about the dean’s amusing joke?”

“Um… doesn’t the town at Enwich actually predate the revolutionary period?” I asked. That seemed like a safer choice than ”Don’t you think you’re being petty?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very good. It does. That settlement was not, however, part of the Imperial Colonies and thus not a part of the early republic. As the subject of this class is Early Republican History, the goings-on of the Enias River Valley at the time of the revolution fall as far outside our scope as those of Chung or the Argentus.”

“But it eventually became part of the republic,” I said. “So…”

“But in doing so it did not retroactively affect the course of the revolution and those events which followed from it,” Hart said. “It remains as irrelevant to our subject as the history of Chung would if tomorrow they joined the empire.”

“But even still, it might be interesting…” I started to say.

“Don’t,” Steff whispered. “Just don’t.”

Too late.

“Very well,” Professor Hart said. “Since you find the subject so interesting, you can prepare a ten minute presentation on the settlement of Fort Prax, circa the year 0 of our current calendar, which you will give before the class on our official Local History Day, to be designated later.”

“What?” I said. “That’s not fair.”

“You have an interest in local history,” he said. “I’ve encouraged it.”

The entire class was silent as he stared at me stony-faced, daring me to say something else. I shrank down in my seat.

“Ha!” Keri La Belle said. She didn’t laugh. She said “ha!”

“And you, Ms. La Belle, can do a ten minute presentation on the… fuck, let’s say the indigenous goblin tribes,” he said.

“Goblins?” she repeated. “Gross.”

“You’ll want to consult the school’s policies on racial tolerance and discrimination before you add any adjectives to your paper. That’s twenty minutes down. I’m sure we’ll have a whole hour filled before the day itself arrives,” Hart said. “Now, if we can move on to something that has even a little bit to do with my actual subject, I want you to open your books to the map on page eighty-one.”

Hart was a good teacher and an interesting lecturer, but neither of those traits precluded his being a monumental dick sometimes. I tried to take solace in the fact that looking up stuff about the old town was something I probably would have done eventually anyway, while having to learn ten minutes’ worth of information about icky goblin tribes would probably kill La Belle stone dead.

I tried to, but couldn’t… the fact that I’d have to stand up in front of the class—La Belle included—and give a speech was what made it punishment. Hell, as pissed as she was now, by the time it came time to give our speeches the whole thing would probably be funny to her. Even if she completely bungled hers, she’d still sit there and laugh at mine every time I fidgeted or stumbled over something.

“Ten minutes,” Steff said, when class was over. “That’s harsh. Thank nobody in particular you’re such a nerd, huh?”

“I wish I were a nerd,” I said. “Nerds love giving presentations. Attention makes us geeks melt.”

“Just imagine we’re all naked,” she said. “For some of us, it’ll be mutual.”

I hated stuffing the beautifully decorated invitation into my coat pocket, since that would mean bending it, but I knew it would get crushed worse in my book bag and carrying it would mean having my hands out the end of my sleeves… I wasn’t yet completely in the habit of making sure I had my gloves when I left the dorm, unfortunately. I finally ended up putting it inside my history book. That would keep it nice and flat and also completely out of sight from Two.

She was at her desk sorting a big mound of jelly beans by color when I went back to the room to drop off my bag after class.

“Ooh, where’d you get those?” I asked.

“My friend Hazel gave them to me for counting,” she said.

“For what?”

“She told me that she needed her jelly beans counted and if I did it properly I could have them,” she said.

“What?” I repeated. I was no master of estimating jelly bean numbers by sight, but there couldn’t be less than a couple hundred in the pile. Apart from the part where Two got a bunch of candy for her trouble, telling her to go count them sounded like the sort of cruel trick a nasty person would play on a recently-freed golem.

“In our cooking class she told me she had left a jar of jelly beans back by the lockers and if I went and counted them while she talked to our friends I could have them,” Two said.

“Oh,” I said. That cleared it up a little… it had been a distraction. Her friend Hazel had needed time to talk to their class-friends without Two there, and so had engineered a situation that would keep her occupied out of earshot.

Not that this was hard to do. Hazel could have said, “Two, go stand over there until I come get you,” and she would have done so. The fact that Hazel had figured out a way to give her something to do while she waited and make it worth her time, though, was kind of inspired.

“Anyway, Two,” I said, ”I don’t want to make this an order, but… I need you to do something for me, okay?”

“Okay, Mack,” she said, looking up from her sorting. “What is it?”

“You probably wouldn’t anyway, but in case you’re cleaning, or whatever… well, I kind of need you to just not look under my bed for a while,” I said. It was strange but kind of encouraging how unused to giving her orders I was getting.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m good at not looking under your bed. For how long?”

“Until after tomorrow night… it shouldn’t matter then.”

“Mack, I can’t just not look under your bed until tomorrow night!” Two said, exasperated. “I have other things that I need to do. I have jelly beans to sort and homework to do and I have to go to dinner and I have to go to class tomorrow…”

“Uh… I guess what I meant was don’t look under my bed,” I said. “In addition to whatever else you’re doing. Not exclusively.”

“Oh,” she said. She blinked and reprocessed, then smiled. “Okay.”

I smiled back. Two’s Day was going to be awesome.