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Day 296 – Word Training # 8

May 27th, 2019
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  1. Day 296 – Word Training # 8
  2.  
  3. The doors to the librarium open slowly, I dare say by design. The bronze slabs only budge with effort, and with the sound of whining metal hinges. Perhaps it's just for defense, but if it was intended to be intimidating, I would understand.
  4.  
  5. I step inside, and once again lament that I don't have the time to spend reading. Countless shelves extend beyond sight, with dozens of figures either walking along them or hunched over some text or another. I glance over them, wondering if I'll see a shock of red hair. I don't.
  6.  
  7. Instead I knock on the door of the one obvious clearly visible from the entrance. A cheerful voice bids me to enter. I do so.
  8. “Victor,” Moore notes as he looks up from a fresh piece of parchment. “I was wondering when you'd make the time to stop by. Come, sit down, tell your old teacher how you've been.”
  9. “This is less about me, sir, and more about my sword.”
  10. His expression turns more serious, though the smile never fully leaves it. “Sit, then, and tell me.”
  11. I do so.
  12. I tell him about the voices. About how I feared encroaching madness.
  13. I tell him about my suspicions as stranger and stranger events surrounded the sword.
  14. I tell him about the incident with the baphomet.
  15.  
  16. I don't tell him about what it said in front of the alley. That was for me alone.
  17.  
  18. And all throughout, he simply watches me. His smile faded to almost nothing.
  19. “Sir, what does it mean?”
  20. “Well,” he begins, slowly, as he tries to recover his smile and fails, “it means that the sword is intelligent. Quite impressive, that. Or perhaps it's a conduit for something else,” he adds, trailing off under my gaze.
  21. “Sir.”
  22. He exhales.
  23. He sets his hands on the desk in front of him.
  24. “Where to begin.”
  25.  
  26. He says that, and yet when he speaks again it is well honed – a speech practiced over years of time. “There was a span in the course of time when all we needed was the moral and martial strength to plant our feet aside righteous cause and swing our swords with both hands. That time has passed. Against this new enemy we must renounce our very selves, and gird ourselves, like snakes, in the skin of our enemies.' Our knowledge of veterinary sciences has progressed since then, but I think that history has shown our forebears correct. I do not think that there was any other way we could have survived.”
  27.  
  28. He lifts his hands again and clasps them thoughtfully beneath his chin. “In the time before the demon lords of modernity, when succubi were still errant creatures and evil could be easily divined, to be a paladin meant something far different. You know that the animosity index is a recent invention, but we don't speak often of how revolutionary an idea it was. For centuries – you would balk to learn how long – we sent young men to face monsters not knowing their natures at all. Wide-eyed idealists would be thrown into the fray expecting ravening beasts, knowing not even the shapes of what they would fight. Even this, however, was an idea born of compromise.”
  29.  
  30. “To understand paladins, you must understand the odds that we originally faced. You know of the forms that dragons can take – their original forms. Stories tall, many more long. Scales harder than steel, thicker than platemail, breath that annihilates all caught within. Armor, against them, meaningless, swords, almost moreso. Now, picture the individuals that stood before them in spite of that. Who gambled on the infinitesimal chance that their sacrifice might mean anything at all. Our origin lay there. Our origin, also, lay in the handful of souls who sought out the bloody and hateful demon lords, offering their service in exchange for survival.” He reaches down and draws from his desk drawer a letter, clearly one of the ones that I had written. “Paladins and blackguards, both.”
  31.  
  32. “Neither side would have ever dealt with the other. Not willingly. Not for anything less than the survival of both. The paladins recognized the world-ending potential if compromise never came, and the unlikelihood that it would. The blackguards saw an end to any chance at power or control in a world drowning in excess. They decided that our name would serve to conceal both those who sought to save the world and those who sought to end it. It was thought that, at the end of this battle, we would divide cleanly in two once more.”
  33.  
  34. “We thought the battle would take a generation at most.”
  35.  
  36. “In time, our order was founded to preserve the history of paladins. That we would serve but a single purpose as a fortress against forgetfulness. Each paladin has been inducted, then, when we felt them ready, would be told the truth. So has it been for each generation before, and now, this one also.”
  37.  
  38. He takes a deep breath, releases it, and then finally asks “Any questions?”
  39. “About a million, sir.”
  40. “Well, let's get started, then.”
  41.  
  42. ---
  43.  
  44. “How did you become a reclaimant, sir?”
  45. “It actually happened near Min. During the war I scouted that area, until I found a young woman who needed help. I didn't know she wasn't human, not for a long time. By then, I'd just gotten my redeployment orders to travel to Caithness.”
  46.  
  47. His gaze slowly shifts to the wall behind me, or someplace further. “I was in pain – unwilling to harm the woman I'd come to care for. So, I went to my superior, and I told him that I could not trust in my judgment anymore.”
  48.  
  49. “He told me that he still did, and that there was a place for men such as him and I.”
  50.  
  51. ---
  52.  
  53. “What is your animosity index, if you don't mind my asking?”
  54. “Oh, heavens, probably little to nothing, which reminds me, you won't need to concern yourself with that anymore.”
  55. “I won't?”
  56. “No. See, that's not just the symbol of our order on your breastplate. We realized that we'd need a means to hide ourselves when those indexers first rolled out.”
  57. “Ah.”
  58.  
  59. “I took great pride in it, once.”
  60. “As did I, Victor. As did I.”
  61.  
  62. ---
  63.  
  64. “What are we to do with monsters, sir?”
  65. “As far as I'm concerned, Victor, nothing at all.”
  66. “Sir?”
  67. “They haven't the numbers to end the world. They haven't the numbers to do anything more than continue. What more would we ask for?”
  68. “I don't know, sir. It's just, I don't know what our purpose is without them.”
  69.  
  70. “Our purpose is what it once was for all paladins, and will be again, Victor. Justice. This world hasn't known it in a very long time. I think the people miss it, insofar as they can only be dimly aware of what they've lost.”
  71.  
  72. ---
  73.  
  74. “Well, sir, I'm about to be late for my training.”
  75. “Did that answer everything?”
  76. “Not yet, sir. I'll,” I start before realizing the weight of what I have yet to learn. “I'll make a list, I guess.”
  77. “That's fair. Please, be careful not to leave anything out for others to find, or communicate any of this except face-to-face. The time is nearing for us to reveal the truth, but it's not just yet. And if we do this poorly, I don't know what will happen.”
  78.  
  79. “Fair enough, sir. I'll trust in your reasoning.”
  80.  
  81. ---
  82.  
  83. “Victor?”
  84.  
  85. I look away from the door to see someone approaching. I know him from somewhere.
  86. “Jonas.” Right. Jonas Fielder. He and I trained to be paladins together.
  87. “What are you doing, man? Still trying to learn the second word?”
  88. I open my mouth to answer him, but then the question itself finally settles in and I find myself terribly confused.
  89. “It'll be impressive if you do. Last I heard, no one's gotten that far in decades.”
  90. “You don't say.”
  91. “Yeah. Even the first one's more trouble than it's worth. Hey, guess that's why you're the knight reclaimant.” At this point he's close enough to reach out and place a hand on my shoulder as he passes. “Best of luck, man.”
  92.  
  93. “Thanks.”
  94.  
  95. I wait until he turns and leaves the corridor before I open the door. I step forward into the room, facing my instructor. “The words don't hurt me anymore.”
  96. “They never did, paladin. You wanted to hurt yourself, so you did. They were never intended to truly harm anyone.”
  97. “The other paladins can't learn them like I can.”
  98. “They seek to pervert them too, but unlike how you did. Their course can be bent, but not broken outright.”
  99. “Then I'm ready to continue.”
  100.  
  101. “That's good. Your time limit is much shorter this time.”
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