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MillionNovel > Endless Stars > Rousing III: Interpret, part i

Rousing III: Interpret, part i

    In silence I slinked away from the G?ren estate and toward my sinkhole of morning shift. Around me the west end was sleeping. The birds didn’t chirp too loudly, there weren’t very many dragons out walking, and even the wind seemed to hold its breath.


    sofran.” Your tongue caught the scent of eyepaint.


    Specter.”


    want?” I asked him. “I need to get to work.”


    attitude, let’s call it. There’s the same inventive paranoia about both of them, by turns charming and vexsome. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”


    wanted a reply, and he had to know that. Transparent.


    knew it. The stars would keep her away from this mess, wouldn’t they?


    library of snakes?”


    Constellation of Houses???—??hates Dyfnder Geunant, and House Specter most of all.” He spoke slowly.


    left the sky, an expatriate, not an exile. And you hide your mark of exile???—??as if it were some embarrassment. What, are you trying to escape your family here? You’re running away?”


    going there. But would it be an insult to point it out? I needed to stay on his good side, at least till I had full citizenship.


    them.”


    Stars, I hope not, I muttered under my breath. I’d seen that ugly eye of Dyfns???—??that oversaturated-purple slit eye with a rainbow of even more oversaturated rays squirting out, just like the eyepaint Adwyn always wore.


    her.”


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    At some point the title stopped echoing in my head, and the silence it left wrung.


    Such a Geunantic phrase.


    sunny out.


    Rawr, it said, as it readied to swallow me and my energy and happiness. On either side of the door were colorful mounds of ash. Natural piles once, but now they had fragments of stained glass pressed in, colluding into a sort of rainbow mosaic. Claff’s work.


    wiver-like.


    should go visit him. He must really feel awful, because he worked so hard when he was here. “I guess I’ll go see him this sometime. Later this evening, maybe. I???—??thanks for telling me, S.”


    relaxing day of inventory,” I said as I walked past him.


    could say I did my good deed for today by not pointing that you’re late, again. Or speculating on what that smell is.” I looked back and he was smirking now. I glared back. He only rolled his head, continuing, “…Mehbe. Depends on what the crowds look like later. Wait for it.”


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    The innards of the shop greeted me, as they always did, lifeless and still, and smelling of some sweet fruity scent floating over dust and strange old plants. The line from the door split the shop proper down the middle; two counters were on either side stretching only a few strides long. Beyond that, the shop was shelves and tables, and some support beams.


    rings of mind-numbing waiting and hallux-twiddling, punctuated by bargaining and bartering and brokering.


    had been last night. I could never set the headband in the exact same position, so it brushed against the singed scales and smarted a little every now and again.


    did need to clean this counter, so I’ll finish this first.


    stop cleaning her counter. I’d droop my frills, and wouldn’t lift my gaze from my counter.


    The Confusion of Underbrush in Drachenzunge.


    “My syllabus demands…” I murmured, translating.


    <h4>The Confusion of Underbrush</h4>


    ? My syllabus demands that multipart essays be individually numbered, that liminal parts be footed with “To be continued…” & that the form & function of every part be exhaustingly stated in the subtitle of said part. ? Every so often, a student will come to me & ask why I demand their multipart essays be labeled so sillily; “Any one of these seems quite sufficient,” they would say, “but the ensemble together seems quite redundant.” In reply, I tell them tale of how the War of Underbrush was started, just as I will now tell you.


    ? There once lived a queen who ruled over a large city with a great & terrible army. She had a great many stupid advisers, & one smart one whom she trusted. The stupid advisers meted out what they thought would keep the large city happy, & sometimes the smart one countered this. ? Nearby to the large city, some of a certain race of dragons with spiny-frills had taken up residence in a dark damp clump of forest which no-one wanted. Till one day, the bigots of the large city demanded the queen do something, anything, about them. ? (This was an unenlightened age, & so a great many tongueless ideas were quite unfortunately in vogue: that spiny-frills would invoke the venom of the gods, that their witches would cook up unhatched eggs, even that they were plotting a takeover of the large city.) ? It came that the stupid advisers echoed the will of those bigots, & the matter was brought up at every meeting thereafter.


    ?


    ?


    ? There once lived also, in a different city, a famous, if trenchant, philophager, & a master of language renown for much, most of all her treatises in & of her mastery of backward branch. Call her Halhalje. ? They say her mother’s mother was spiny-frilled, but she ever denied these accusations & no records remain to be quite sure. Yet in spite of these suspicions, she had risen high to prominence, commanding respect from the learnéd across the land. It was all very impressive at the time.


    ? Halhalje had a particular delivery of lectures that was alternately the sweetened poison tone of those words said before some long-anticipated murder, or the bombast of such that might inflict those killings. All the while, her phrasing rarely strayed from that rarefied verbosity of academics, but it didn’t quite suffer from it. It was a contrast.


    ? You will know that the forest’s poetry spat out its philosophy, began her first lectures of the gyra. Even its name is poetry: know a ‘philophager’ is, in the literal, a love-eater; for a good poet should strip the world to its skeleton) . Halhalje would say this with some bite & a particular snap, & the sounds would fill the lecture hall. ? & know that a number far too large of schools of poetry had flourished, as is their wont, & that all but the most mercilessly abstract eventually spat out their own little school of exposition or argumentation. But you are fledglings, you won’t care about that. Let’s talk about two: the fair backward branch & the slimy long vine.


    ? Halhalje paused for a beat, & the crowd of students seated look bored, only a few paying quite rapt attention (for the philophager was a good speaker, but not a miracle-worker). To introduce her next point, the lecturer began breathing loudly, & then continued:


    ? When you talk, you breathe, said Halhalje. Arguments breathe just as well, & being smart dragons we divide them up like this & call the parts breaths. ? Know that that backward branch goes is two ‘branches’ in the first two breaths, probably your position & your interlocutor’s, & it’s done with a meeting of the branches that reconciles them, she said, & punched her feet together. The details get elaborate (as does, I add, anything academics find stimulating) but what you fledglings need to care about is the aesthetic: here, two branches subequal yet distinct, & a meeting which privileges neither side; an aesthetic of fairness. Remember this, & you might claw something worth looking at. ? Obversely, the long vine goes by persuasion, instead than negotiation, Halhalje started, & her tone had noticeable tarnished. The first breath argues for your interlocutor’s position, the second will show how that weaves into a position partway between the two, & the last breath shows how this liminal position weaves into your own. Halhalje then sat down. This is an aesthetic of gravity, of the inveterate pull of reason???—??or mere slimy rhetoric, most often. ? Regardless, one can see all the common here: both argue for each side & a composite; but the journey of one is the destination of the other. Halhalje was waving her hands around as was the usual gesture of summary. Suffer it to say that the aesthetics of philophagic argumentation determine the form & content.


    ? I could go on, but Halhalje, having yet to publish some book of her own, would scarcely appreciate her lectures begin repeated here. You know what matters for the story, regardless. ? It wasn’t long after giving this introductory lecture one year that the philophager returned to her office to find a certain letter there. The aforementioned queen had mailed her.


    ?


    did he have to watch his hatchlings? Ashaine and I could do whatever we wanted as hatches, and we lived in the sky. What was there to worry about on the surface?


    ?


    ? Meanwhile, thing had not grown better in the large city. It came to pass that more & more of the queen’s advisers & the large city’s elite called for, nay, demanded, action against the spiny-frilled dragons. They asked them to be killed, or at least forced from the dark damp clump of forest which no-one wanted. ? Sensibly, the smart adviser asked of the queen to claw a latter to enlightened Halhalje, entreat her just what should be done about the spiny frills. Neither of them had read the phager’s works. ? After many cycles, the phager did reply back, & with three scrolls. The queen, a patron of the learning herself, & fancying herself philophagic, studied the scrolls. ? In them, she read a long vine argument which grew from trusting & accepting the spiny frills, to a measured & sympathetic approach, to starving them economically to coerce them out of the dark damp clump of forest which no-one wanted. ? Against her initial judgment, the queen was taken in by this argument, & her treasurers & judges set to work to implement the philophager’s interdicts.


    ? Like you would too, the spiny-frills in that dark damp clump of forest which no-one wanted did not take well to the embargoes. While some starved or were preyed upon, a few took to burglary & vandalism upon the large city which had denied them basic dignities. ? One day, a spiny-frilled bandit killed, perhaps accidentally, a visiting noble in a robbery gone artfully wrong. ? The large city was in uproar, & the queen, with all her advisers breathing on her frills, had come to a final decision. The great & terrible army was roused & unleashed upon the nestled village in that dark damp clump of forest which no-one wanted. ? Just like that, in a single day, the peaceable village in the dark damp clump of forest which no-one wanted was destroyed & its inhabitants were killed, drake, wiver, & hatchling.


    ? When that trenchant philophager Halhalje learnt of this, she was star-crushed; for she hated long vine, seeing it as a slimy, manipulative form.


    ? No, her message had been in backward branch.


    ?


    * * *
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