Flashback Portrait of the Azenth as a young man

[Leo Varniak]

This thread takes place at several times between 493 and 502 AV. No topic can jeopardize the harmony of a married couple like the education of their offspring does. The Varniak household was no exception. Enter Allistir Varniak, potter by trade, drunkard by choice. He was a firm believer that to go far in life, you had to learn a trade, marry someone who was even better than you, and watch the Mizas roll in. Once you had the basic ingredients down, you were on the path to success, defined as a state where you could drink the night away and still not worry about your tab the next day. Allistir Varniak was a very successful man, but he was never happy for it and always made sure the rest of the family knew. With the language of fists - the universal tongue for teaching your wife to stay in line and showing your son how the world works. Lina Varniak had a different view, however. She believed that little Leo should receive an actual education. She taught him to read, write and do math herself, when he was still very young. She was delighted to find that, while little Leo had started to speak relatively late, he learned the ways of letters and numbers with ease. Indeed, it was their secret game for her to scribble down sentences, and for him to try and read them aloud. Little by little, the sentences turned long and winding and Lina knew she would soon need help with Leo's education. They made good money, and the expenses were not going to be a problem - she'd just deny herself something to pay the tutors if needbe - but she'd have to keep it a secret from her husband. Given how little attention he actually paid to the household when he wasn't in a rage, however, she felt it was not going to be that hard. Little Leo wrote decently and with a good display of grammar at age six. He still didn't talk much, and his mother knew it couldn't be helped. The bloodline - the real one - was one of brooders, after all. He wasn't fond of the games usually favored by children his age; the spinning top, he'd incinerated in the hearth while he thought nobody was watching him. He had stared at it longingly, almost in a trance, as it burned to a crisp. The transformation, the wood cracking open as the flames hugged it from all around, carving ashen patterns on the surface before crushing it in a shower of sparks... Lina couldn't find his other wooden toys shortly afterwards, and had her suspicions concerning what had been of them. He liked to draw, though, and when she sacrificed the meager allowance Allistir gave her to buy him precious colored chalks, the red one was by far the one he wore out before the rest. It was then that she introduced him to the realm of painting. It would be best if she could channel a love of art into him, she felt. A stabilizing presence, so to speak. A man must grow up learning how to appreciate beauty, lest he turn out like her husband. This thought scared her the most. A small soul like Allistir Varniak was one thing. The potential for disaster if Leo Zaital followed on the same path was enormous. As an excuse, she mentioned his talent and said Leo could help her paint the ceramics and earthenware. He'd be painting the seconds to begin with, and only the simplest patterns at that. Mere dots and lines for the commoners who wanted to think they could dine like wealthy men. Allistir shrugged and thought it couldn't hurt to try. Maybe they could get his feeble son to start working sooner this way. And so, Leo learned how to make and paint enamel on the high-quality porcelain of the Varniak pottery. He became intimately familiar with the kiln and its operation. The heat didn't make him sweat; he seemed to absorb it like a sponge. His artistry looked best in those swirly, flame-like patterns that gently embraced a teacup's borders running all the way to the handle. But Lina's work was only barely just begun. She wanted her son to become a man of culture, well-versed in the ways of the world. He would need it. Those without knowledge were easily manipulated by those with it. She was a wise woman; indeed, her reasons for even marrying Allistir Varniak were mysterious. Once young Leo could read and write comfortably, she started inquiring with her customers at the shop. Whenever she learned from the local grapevine that a wandering scholar had made his way into Syliras, she was certain to contact him and offer money she had painfully set aside to buy precious bells of tutorage for her son. He was seven when he met his first tutor.

[Leo Varniak]

Maruzen Keyton called himself a "doctor of the natural, paranatural and metanatural sciences". That seemed to cover the whole spectrum of what there was to learn, but deeper inquiries on Lina's part revelead he was first and foremost a scholar of human sciences. He possessed excellent command over several languages, had studied racial anthropology and was even something of a medic of the mind. He had a reputation for supporting fringe theories, and he had been ostracized from several erudite circles around Sylira, but he was in desperate enough need of money to accept Lina's offer without much haggling. He only protested that the pupil was much too young to appreciate anything he could teach him. "The brain ages inside the body like the drink, you see; you must partake of knowledge after it's turned into wine, and before it turns into vinegar." Lina then offered a little extra, which caused him to see things in a miraculous new light. "Yet the human mind is an endlessly fascinating machine. Who knows what it is really capable of at his age?" One day when Allistir was out on some business Lina had artfully coaxed into being, young Leo met Dr. Keyton for the first time. The doctor, who was a tall, large man with a reddish goatee and one suit of expensive clothing that was long worn out at the elbow, looked down at the much smaller child sitting on a chair. Leo lookep up, not very impressed. "So, young master Varniak, do you know who I am?" Dr. Keyton asked, trying to sound cheerful. Leo's dark eyes scrutinized the adult and he provided his best guess in a soft voice: "A fat man?" The doctor's smile faltered. This was exactly why he didn't work with younger children who still needed diapers for their mouths. Nevertheless, he found himself under financial duress, and the idea that he might actually have to start working with his hands for a living proved even stronger than his disappointment. "Why yes, young master Varniak. I am the fat man who'll be teaching you to look past appearances. My name is Maruzen Keyton, but you can call me Dr. Keyton." Leo thought it over for a second. "What's a doctor?" "They come in several types. Some doctors cure the sick. I'm just one who has studied a lot and wants something to show for it. I'm no Professor, so Doctor will have to do. That concludes my introduction. We shall now begin our lessons with a look at the ancient tongue." Leo looked puzzled. "Ancient?" "As in old. Not new. People no longer speak it as a first language. Except the occasional crazy-ass Nuit, but they don't count as people." "But I want to learn new things! Not old!" It was painfully obvious the doctor left much to be desired as an educator of the young. Tossing words carelessly was not conducive to success with children. Leo whined some more. "New, new, new. Teach me about fire!" The doctor gave a pained look at the hourglass set on the table. The sand had just begun to accumulate in the lower half, and the excruciating slowness with which the grains trickled down was painful to watch. There was no way he could do this. Still, he pictured himself working in a forge or tending to some crop, and it all became bearable once more. "Now, the thing with the ancient tongue is, it keeps coming back into our lives when you least expect it. I brought books, so open that one on page five, if you please." Ten chimes later, he'd managed to have Leo open the book and cast a look at the opening paragraph. 'What we call ancient tongue was once known as Nader-canoch, a compound expression we can roughly translate as 'our word'. This provides valuable insight into what the language represented for the primitive man. The term implies shared possession, a sense of collective belonging to the greater human community, and the idea that such cohesion is intimately connected to the spoken language. To the early man, the Protohuman living in a world of danger and chaos, to speak was to belong; he knew that whoever and whatever did not speak his language was automatically his mortal enemy. We can almost feel the ancient human's relief at his words being understood by another who can decipher his thoughts. Mutual understanding with their fellow men and women must have been one of the greatest joys these hardy people ever knew.' The doctor gave a sigh. The material was too advanced for a seven year old boy. Leo had skimmed the words briefly, but had already gotten bored with them. Fear mounted in the doctor that he might not get paid after all. The child was looking at him now, staring right into his eyes. What the petch was the matter with those accusing eyes? The doctor was about to snap, and perhaps break his chair with his significant weight, when the boy spoke. "It means they were scared and made up a language so they wouldn't be scared anymore. It made them strong." Doctor Keyton was transfixed. After a long moment, he nodded. "Yes. That is exactly the gist of it. Do you know all those difficult words, young master? Insight, collective, cohesion, decipher?" Leo shook his head forcefully. "Who's the young master?" "I mean Leo. How do you know the meaning of this text if you don't know what the words mean?" The child shrugged. "It couldn't mean anything else." A few bells later, the doctor was enjoying a cup of tea with Lina, who was very curious to hear the man's impressions. "Young Leo is a very uncommon child, ma'am," he began after a generous helping of cookies, "he's very sharp for his age. His intuition is especially keen. He can figure out a difficult passage of text while only understanding isolated words here and there. He's not always correct, of course, and when I prove him wrong he sulks and gets depressed over it. I suspect he's quite hard on himself. Also, he didn't have the least interest in the subject at first, but as soon as he started thinking of it as a challenge he suddenly got eager. I told him no kid his age could possibly learn the ancient tongue, and I think he's still in the other room studying the book I gave him. I try to keep him on his toes. I mislead him at times, make him get things wrong on purpose just so I can correct him later. He's what could be called a sore loser and won't let go until he's gotten the next answer right. If it is all right with you, ma'am, I'll be back in three days for the next lesson. He can keep the book in the meantime." Lina smiled and paid him handsomely, thus lighting up the doctor's world with rosy colors. He'd staved off the forge one more day.

[Leo Varniak]

The good doctor was back three days later, as promised. This time he had learned to handle Leo a bit better than before. The first thing he did was question the child on what he'd learned in his absence, pouring over the book. This interested him very much, because without a tutor to correct him, all Leo had was his own imagination and a very difficult book for his age. Leo nodded sharply with a hint of pride. He had worked hard and wanted to show off the results. "Vaknui means fire," he proclaimed with the dogmatic certainty of children. He seemed to like the sound of it, and Keyton suspected he'd recited the word many times over the past few days. The tutor gave a smile. "That it does, Leo. It actually means quite a few other things too. The ancient tongue is like that. A scholar would say that it is an intrinsically metonymy-driven language." He was the one showing off now, almost begging for the obvious question. Which punctually arrived. "What's meto..." "Oh, that, a word we use in literature when we want to sound important. You see, in the ancient tongue, you can use the same word to speak of something and a much bigger version of that something. It is also very associative, so the same word can mean something else that the primary meaning reminds you of. So, fire, warmth... Vaknui was also the word you used to describe the flickering light from a fire. Do get the vowels right, though... Vak-nui, as in Nuit. It comes from the root phoneme... err, sound 'vak'. Hence the fire god Ivak, may he be forgotten till the end of time." Leo frowned. Once again, the doctor couldn't gauge how much of this he'd actually processed. He waited patiently, and finally he got a strange reply from the child. "What's bigger than a fire?" Eyris, but how many questions did this kid ask? Then again, the doctor had also asked lots of questions when he was younger. He smiled at Leo, who was still wearing a tiny concentration frown, sitting tight on his chair with his head propped up on his hands. "Not bigger," the doctor said in a sagely tone, "broader. Expansive. Encompassing. You could also use Vaknui to mean change by means of deconstruction, umm, unmaking. It would be clear to your listener by the context, that is, the other things you say before and after. Will you answer a question, Leo?" The child looked suspicious now. His expression told the doctor he was in that phase where most adults were out to get him. "Maybe?" Dr. Keyton was asking out of genuine curiosity now. "Why was that the first word you decided to learn? It wasn't a part of the beginning lessons. Last time too, you said you wanted to learn about fire. Why's that?" Once again he'd forgotten he was speaking with a seven year old Syliran kid. "Fire is nice." Leo gave it a little more thought. "It's not like anything else." "You could say that of everything," the doctor retorted and realized something. "You know, this just now was a philosophical question. Philosophy means love of knowledge and is under the domain of the goddess Eyris. If you seek the wisdom of the universe and other people think you do nothing but eat and think, you're a philosopher. Or in your case, a firosopher!" Leo didn't get the pun. That was probably for the better, the doctor conceded to himself. "Like when Mother makes cookies and hides them places and I find out where she put them?" young Leo considered. "That too, Leo. The first philosopher must have been born when a drunkard woke up one morning and didn't recognize where he was. He must have asked himself where in all of the Ukalas he was and how he'd ended up there, and thus was philosophy born." The doctor regretted saying that immediately. Leo physically shrunk into his seat and said nothing at all. He merely sat in perfect immobility, and was more than a little creepy to behold. It was really easy to mess up with a child, the doctor thought. This time he was actually more sorry that he'd hurt his pupil than at the prospect that he might be dismissed and not get paid. The mention of a drunk man seemed to have brought him into this state. "Hey, hey," the doctor whispered, "it's all right, it's all right, Leo. There's nothing to fear in this room. Please... come back..." he was grasping at straws. His average pupil was at least five years older than Leo Varniak. It would have been easier if he'd simply start crying, the doctor considered. In the little time he'd known Leo, however, he'd noticed that his outward reactions were quite limited. Despite that, he was probably more sensitive than he appeared. Finally, Leo seemed to wake up from that eerie reverie. "Father's no fillosopher," he said simply. "Just a drunk." The strength of that judgment surprised Dr. Keyton. He had suspected something strange in the Varniak family dynamics, but it really was not his place to judge. With any other child, he would have tried to defuse the situation by changing the topic. It'd have done him little good with Leo, however. He was not going to move on until the current crisis had been dealt with somehow. The child was like that. "Not every man is born to be one," the doctor said at last. He had made a big mistake before, right when he was getting Leo to open up a little more and even reveal something of himself. Maybe, if skirting the topic wasn't an option, he could push it deeper. The pupil was a precocious child, after all. "Philosophy is for a very special kind of men. Most people live in the here and now. Most people fear that, if they start asking the why and how of things, their world here and now will change and make them unhappy. Do you think your Father is like that?" Leo was trying to avoid his gaze now. His fists were clenched, the doctor noticed. "I don't know. I don't care. I want to read the book some more. I don't want to talk." But the doctor had gotten very serious. "It's always easier to learn from the book, yes. But is it truer? A book won't talk back. There are philosophers who never wrote a thing just for that reason. How can you deal with a problem, any problem if you don't talk?" The silence that followed made the doctor more and more uncomfortable. But he did reply in the end. "Vaknui..."

[Leo Varniak]

Lina Varniak did not act all too surprised when the doctor told her the day's events in the softest expressions he could muster, but it certainly seemed to sadden her. She took it with the utmost dignity, which was somewhat out of place with a potter's wife, and simply asked Dr. Keyton what he planned on doing. The doctor felt ever so inadequate to the task, but a mixture of need, guilt and curiosity pushed him on. "Philosophy is best taught after the onset of puberty, this much is known," he pondered aloud, "I should best keep his curriculum light on these subtle matters. Children are very flexible at learning languages, so I would insist with the ancient tongue and mix in elements of history, geography, grammar, literature and other sciences. I am afraid I cannot be of help with mathematics, but as you are probably aware, it is not a natural, paranatural or metanatural science." Lina threw a question his way that he did not expect. She asked about the learning of magic. The doctor's face darkened in displeasure at the notion. "My good lady, based on what I have learned about your son, I would discourage you from pursuing that path with him, more so at this young age. I do believe he should attend classes at the University of Zeltiva when he's grown to an appropriate age, but I do not know what will be of him if he learns magic. I speak as a mundane, of course, but I possess first-hand research knowledge of the ill effects of magic on these... special souls. If you are wise, my lady, you will keep him away from magic until he's grown old enough to avoid being twisted by these arts. I know of children who took arcane tutelage early on, and grew up with their magic. It is possible, yes, but a child with godlike powers is an adult who believes he is an actual god. Maybe in adulthood, maybe. Even so, young Leo is a very gifted boy and surely needs no magic to shine in life, wouldn't you agree?" Lina smiled at the man and never touched on that topic again. The doctor was back at the Varniak residence several times throughout the next few seasons. He could not come too often because of Allistir's presence in the house, but he always left plenty of books and homework for Leo to do. As suspected, he grew fond of the ancient tongue's crude methods of expression. "It sounds so ugly, though..." the child observed one day, "kash, gutatl rakorash... sounds like someone's got a tummy ache. Like someone sick." The tutor actually smiled at that. The pupil's pronunciation had distinctly improved. "Well, Leo. Walk a mile in their shoes before you judge their language. I want you to think about something. Let's pretend you are one of these old, old people. You live in a crude hut that you share with seven, eight other people, some of whom are not family. You just have to live cramped because you must keep your village as small as possible. Why is that? A smaller perimeter," and here he gestured to convey the idea of an enclosure, "easier to defend. It makes all the difference, you see. There are torches on the walls, torches between the huts, fires burning at all times, night and day. People watching all the time. Everyone has a sword or an axe lying next to their sleeping bodies; most wear crude leather armor in their beds, or what passes for beds. If a watchman blows the horn, people rise as one man, clutch their weapons and quickly move into formation. Children younger than you, Leo, can already gut a grown man with a dagger. They already know how to go for the throat." Leo listened with his mouth half-open. The doctor knew he had the child's undivided attention. He suspected as much; he may not be into fairy-tales all that much, but actual history caught his interest. "Most of the time," he pressed on, "the worst danger comes from the ground; but monsters fly in the sky that can dive in, grab you and take off before the man standing next to you can even start yelling. Or the ground just opens up and some worm just swallows you up whole. You'd be digested within chimes, while still alive. Everything out there has claws, but you. All you have is each other, your own ingenuity, and faith in a god who may or may not answer your prayers. This is what life was like for our distant ancestors, Leo. Now, in all honesty, if that was your world, what would your words sound like... 'djakash ruk' or 'llentolorien lu lu'." The child nodded ever so slowly. "They were in great pain, weren't they?" "The pain of being alive, no doubt," the doctor answered. "You can feel that in their language. When you speak the ancient tongue - or, more likely, when you read and write it - you must never forget that pain. A language is the shadow of those who speak it. What we are is carved in what we left behind. You can learn so much from simply observing that." Leo said nothing to that, but Dr. Keyton felt that the lesson had sunk in very deep. The young pupil would be sure to remember this. He also made even better progress with the language from that day, as if he was able to better relate to its creators and their plight. Before long he was speaking and writing full sentences. He'd turned eight and was as precocious as ever. As long as the doctor avoided anything that might remind him of his father, he made an ideal student who wouldn't have been out of place with pupils several years his seniors. As the doctor reflected on what step he should take next, his mother's words about magic returned to him. 'He's a very curious boy and will likely become interested in magic at some point,' he reasoned, 'I can simply ignore the topic altogether, which will just make him want it even worse and could lead him into a fatal mistake, or I can breach the subject in a neutral light and leave things for him to decide when he's older.' He made up his mind and showed up at the Varniak residence with a new book for Leo. "Today," he announced, showing off his new suit that wasn't worn out at the elbow (and which he'd been able to afford in part thanks to Leo's tutorage), "we take your lessons one step further. I brought you an actual book written in the ancient tongue, with side-by-side translations into common." And he presented the pupil with a rather anonymous-looking bound book of average size, entitled 'The Treval Codex'.

[Leo Varniak]

The doctor slid the book over to Leo and motioned for him to open it. "This," he explained in a slightly mysterious tone, "is not a book of magic, but a book about magic. Maybe even the book. It was written by a daughter of Eyris and, you probably guessed it, a philosopher. Also a queen, a wizard, a politician, a historian and much more. Her name was Avakalashi... what does her name mean in the ancient tongue?" Leo instantly put on one of his frowns as he looked down at the white cover of the book. Figuring out the roots of Protohuman names was always quite tough because the phonemes often mingled with each other in grammatically impure ways. Dr. Keyton was especially interested in Leo's interpretation. "I think..." the young student ventured out, "something like... 'big fire going to the sky'..." The doctor's eyes narrowed as he gave a grin. "Close, but could be closer. Remember there's rarely a single meaning to a phrase in the ancient tongue. You got the elements down right, a-vak-ala-shi. The use of 'a' in front of 'vak' is a honorific - an indication of respect - and does not quantify the following 'vak'. Because there were no vowels in early writings, her name would have been rendered as vk'l'sh." Leo nodded and the teacher went on explaining. "The combination of 'vak' and 'ala' forms the bulk of her name. You get the idea of fire or brightness rising to the sky, but the final part, 'sh', should have alerted you to the fact that the motion is actually downward. Remember 'shis', that is, to fall." Leo blinked. "But fire goes up..." "A line from this very book says that up and down are the same," the tutor objected. "Indeed, the world is round - as can be seen readily by observing a distant ship sink beneath the horizon - and to someone standing on the other side, his up is your down and the other way around." Leo was still wrapping his head around that fact when Dr. Keyton resumed. "But back to Avakalashi, first queen of Alahea, according to the legends she was said to have come from the sky to enlighten... err, bring wisdom to any and all. And so, the Alaheans made it their mission to reach the sky their great queen had come from. A grand dream, with a tragic ending." Leo said nothing to that and simply opened the book. He really preferred to learn from the written word, the doctor thought. He decided to interrupt the history lesson to leave Leo with the freedom to explore the book. The child was nothing if not obstinate, and his mother paid Dr. Keyton to educate him in the ways of culture, not to spoonfeed him information. Leo tilted his head. "These are stories?" "Some are, yes, but they aren't fairytales. More like parables, tales meant as symbols. Meant to make you think." He watched as Leo navigated the first few pages of the book, his eyes flickering between the left pages with the original text and the right ones with the common translation. After a quick inspection of random pages, he backtracked to the very beginning of the book and, without asking for permission or waiting for it to be given, immersed himself in the read. 'If they'd asked me to read this at his age, I'd have kicked them in the shin,' the doctor thought honestly. Leo, on the other hand, seemed engrossed in the text. The tutor knew the first of the Codex's 358 paragraphs by heart and didn't have to follow along with Leo's eyes. 1. Djed Which was translated on the right as 1. The spine No sooner had the great king of the South risen to the throne and the revelries of his coronation faded into silence that he began to erect his tomb. He summoned his scribes and proclaimed his mighty will. 'I shall live forever in the rock and the rock shall forever live with me. So it shall be written, so it shall be done.' The scribes went forth and summoned the chamberlains; the chamberlains went forth and summoned the architects; the architects went forth and summoned the quartermasters; the quartermasters went forth and summoned the stone masons; the stone masons went forth and gathered the slaves. A rock was born of blood, sweat and tears that cast shadows over the entire city of the South. It eclipsed Syna from view in the day, and Leth in the dark. The once great country broke and bled against the unforgiving rock: it was their mausoleum just as much as the king's. The sovereign, now old, was pleased to see his testament completed just as the time of his death approached. But the gods shook their heads at his arrogance and the rock broke as it had broken those who had labored on it. The rock turned to dust and fell upon the city, turning it to dust as well. The old king, pale and trembling, summoned his scribes and proclaimed his feeble will. 'I should have lived forever in the rock and the rock should have forever lived with me. Seek him who holds the wisdom of things and bring him here. So it shall be written, so it shall be done.' The scribes went forth and summoned the wise men. The wise men went forth and summoned the messengers. The messengers went forth and summoned the horsemen. The ancient king lay in his deathbed when a man entered the palace, bare of its once great wealth. The slaves had long fled with the gold and silver. Only a blind servant and an old scribe remained by his side as he embarked in his last voyage. The man who answered the summons stood in the king's presence without kneeling. 'I am the Master of the Many Ways', he spoke as the scribe noted his words. 'I once slaved under your whip and shed my blood for your rock.' The king was outraged at being addressed thusly by a mere slave, but his harsh words were merely a dying man's cough. 'I shall forgive your insolence, slave, if only you would grant my last wish for wisdom. Do tell me, you who call yourself Master of the Many Ways, why did the rock fall that was raised by a hundred and one architects, each of them a paragon of his craft?' And the Master of the Many Ways spoke to him, as the scribe wrote: 'Many are the ways, but none can be without the spine. The spine rules all, and yet is slave to all; you cannot be a master unless you have been a slave. All that which stands upright has a spine. To create is to make a new spine. You, however, made no such attempt. You birthed a rock from voice and parchment, but your slaves gave all the blood, sweat and tears. There was no part of you in the rock, and thus it fell, as it should have.' The king saw the truth in the man's words, and knew the error in his ways. He had erected not his tomb, but that of his people. The Master of the Many Ways closed the king's eyes as he passed and commanded the scribe that this truth be known: that is not real which is not bought with sacrifice. "What do you think?" asked the doctor when he noticed Leo's eyes had stopped roaming. "Can you make anything of it?" Leo thought it over long and hard. He didn't really understand it on a conscious level, the doctor could tell, but the text spoke to him somehow. In a few years, he'd likely figure it all out. Then he'd come back to the book and see why it was so important to magic and the study of wisdom in general. "You..." he tried at last, "you can't ask someone else to do things..." The doctor nodded. "A very literal reading, but not at all untrue. You can't place on others the burden of creation on your behalf. Here, however, Avakalashi was referring also to the basic magical principle, stating that you can't make magic without giving it a piece of yourself. Actually, the word Djed that wizards use comes from this book. The ancient humans were fascinated by the spine, you see. It is, after all, what makes us stand rather than crawl, so they found it to be source of courage, spirit, invention, and strength. Avakalashi called it spine or backbone, nowadays philosophers would call it an ontological principle, but those are words you won't have to bother with for quite a few years still." Leo shifted in his seat, as if testing his own spine for the first time. "I like spine. Will you teach me magic then?" "I will shortly be teaching you the magic of grammatical prepositions." Unfortunately, it would be years before Leo ever learned the true basics of Djed as seen in magic, and it would be from the Glyphing notebooks of a certain rival potter. By then he'd have burned Allistir Varniak to death and incinerated the pretty residence in which he was now taking lessons with the doctor.

[Leo Varniak]

There was much wisdom to be found within the Treval Codex. Much of it went right into an eight year old's left ear and out of the right, but years later he would reread the lines with a newfound understanding and it would all click together. Some passages were downright puzzling, others were illuminating. It was no wonder authors had published a long list of commentaries to the Codex, providing their own views on the subject. There were anthropological dissections of the work, mystical hypotheses and even many conspiracy theories surrounding the book. 301. Power Power is not in the word but with the word. Power is not with the action but in the action. Power is not with the will or in the will: it is the will. Dr. Keyton brought the paragraph to Leo's attention. It was one of the shorter sections of the Codex. "They are sometimes called mottos, or definitions. Not stories but very short lessons, meant to be powerful. What do you think this one is trying to teach?" The truth was that some of the mottos had caused great controversy among scholars. It was not always easy to second-guess an Alvina, and interpretations abounded, but the doctor was interested in his young pupil's opinion anyway. Leo was a little taken aback by the play with words, and doctor nodded at his hesitation. "Older writings are often like this. They can be hard to understand, and something is always lost in translation. Does it make you think, though?" Leo considered the line for a little while. "Actions are better than words?" he ventured at last, "and will is even better?" He looked up at the teacher looking for a reaction in his eyes. The doctor thought about it in turn. "Very often, there isn't just one answer, Leo. Two or more answers can be all correct, if you were really asking more than one thing with your question. It certainly seems to put willpower on a different level than anything else, which is old wisdom indeed. 'When there's a will, there's a way'. Then again the codex was written over eight thousand years ago; old wisdom was still brand new back then. I wonder, however, if 'better' really is the appropriate word to use. Avakalashi certainly did not dislike words, or she wouldn't have written one of the earliest books known to man. Rather, isn't she saying how words and actions are related to power in different ways?" Suddenly, the doctor went very serious and said: "Leo, go fetch me an apple from the kitchen." The child blinked, not expecting such a request and wondering why it had been made right now of all times (even though Dr. Keynes was, in his eyes, the fattest man he'd ever talked to.) In the end, however, he stood up reluctantly and disappeared in the kitchen, only to return with a big red apple which he handed out to the doctor with a slightly indignant expression on his face. The doctor smiled and bit into the fruit with gusto. "So, Leo," he said, munching on the apple, "I made a request which you didn't have to grant, but you did anyways. That gave me power over you. Was that power in the word, or with the word?" At first, Leo seemed more fascinated by the speed at which the doctor was erasing the apple from this world. "What's the difference?" he asked after a while. The doctor set the finished core of the apple on the table. "Well, look at it this way. If a random stranger got in here and asked you to get him an apple, would you do it for him?" Leo shook his head and the teacher went on. "So it's not in the word iself. The word carries your meaning, but not your power. My power was traveling with the word, hand in hand like two lovely siblings. Now consider your action of bringing me the apple. It gave you power over the apple, didn't it? And that power was in the action itself - anyone else, by the same action, would have ended up with the apple here, on the table. Understood?" Leo gave two short nods. "And my will gave me power over both you and the apple. Had I not put my will into the order, chances are you would have frowned at me and told me to go get the bloody apple by myself, right?" "No, I'd have told you not to freeload. Freeloaders are bad." The doctor laughed at that. "You make a valid statement, all right. I just hope you remember this when you're older. If you just observe those around you for a moment, just for a little while, you will see that all people do is order other people to give them their apples. If the other person agrees, we call it slavery. If he doesn't agree, on the other hand, we call it war. Look carefully and you'll see the pattern everywhere." This lesson was another one that would stay with Leo for a long time. The doctor had done an excellent job of conveying the base unit of human interaction in terms suitable for a child: most people are out for your apples, don't let them have your treasure. It was perhaps one of the doctor's most informational lessons; unfortunately, it was also to be one of the last. They were discussing yet another paragraph of the Codex, a couple seasons later, when Allistir Varniak burst into the room in a fury. The doctor was a bigger man than Leo's father, but very much a pacifist who couldn't have hurt a fly. The potter grabbed the scholar by the neck of his suit and forcefully lifted him from his seat while screaming in his ear. What he actually screamed did not make a lot of sense, but it had to do with this being his petching house and no petching bookworm would be leeching cash outta him. Forcefully dragged to the door, the doctor barely had time to read the fear in Leo's eyes and the sorrowful apologies in Lina's. He was tossed out unceremoniously, him first and his book second, landing squarely on the top of his head. Then the door slammed shut and Dr. Keyton knew that his predicament may have ended, and the forge might be just a little closer for him - but for two others it had only just begun. Lina never attempted to contact him again, probably to keep him out of danger; nor could he have accepted an invitation to a house where he was, quite obviously, not welcome. Lina wore the bruises of that afternoon for some time. Leo took his punishment without a word. For a while there was no mention of hiring another tutor for the boy, but the woman hadn't given up in the least. Her son's education was far from complete and she would find someone else who could see to it.