Palamedes Sextus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hellonspectacles) wrote2021-10-31 03:48 pm
hellonspectacles) wrote2021-10-31 03:48 pm
Entry tags:
The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret
Palamedes keeps up a careful, steady pace as he walks across the city from the boardwalk to his apartment building. It takes every ounce of his not-insignificant self-control for him to do so, every instinct telling him to run until he is out of breath, or to stop where he is in the middle of the road and put pen to paper to make sense of what Gideon has told him.
Gideon didn’t die. The revelation is so great that Palamedes hasn’t even begun to consider what strange Darrow mechanism had caused the memories to enter her mind. What she had told him, as they shivered over their chipped mugs of tea, had been more strange, more wild, more world-changing than solving Darrow’s mysteries ever could be.
And there had been other things, too—stranger and more wild, that hinted at thousand-year conspiracies and a fundamental rottenness at the heart of all he has ever known.
Palamedes doesn’t even notice if Cam is home when he flies into the apartment and makes a beeline for his room. Technically, the Master Warden is incapable of forgetting an idea once it has taken root; in practice, like all good scholars, he believes in writing everything down.
He closes the door and leans against it with his eyes tightly shut, only to see familiar words emblazoned across his eyelids. He lied to us.
When Pal had asked Gideon if she knew what these revelations meant, really meant, she had said she did, but Palamedes doesn’t think that’s quite true. It isn’t her fault; Pal hasn’t expounded much on those last few minutes of his life, telling himself it is because he doesn’t have enough evidence to support his theories, but knowing, deep down, that his avoidance has a lot more to do with his own fears.
Still, they all understand pieces of it: Cam knows nearly as well as he does how they had picked at the lyctorhood theorem, trying to make it less awful in its conclusions, trying to make it right; Harrow, in her wild effort to keep some piece of Gideon whole, had, as usual, found a solution by awful instinct; Gideon, poor Gideon, now knows more intimately than all of them the sort of indifference their God is capable of.
Now, Palamedes Sextus has to put it all together and present his awful, terrifying, wonderful conclusion.
He sits down at the desk in the corner of the room and begins to write.
He doesn’t stop until morning.
Gideon didn’t die. The revelation is so great that Palamedes hasn’t even begun to consider what strange Darrow mechanism had caused the memories to enter her mind. What she had told him, as they shivered over their chipped mugs of tea, had been more strange, more wild, more world-changing than solving Darrow’s mysteries ever could be.
And there had been other things, too—stranger and more wild, that hinted at thousand-year conspiracies and a fundamental rottenness at the heart of all he has ever known.
Palamedes doesn’t even notice if Cam is home when he flies into the apartment and makes a beeline for his room. Technically, the Master Warden is incapable of forgetting an idea once it has taken root; in practice, like all good scholars, he believes in writing everything down.
He closes the door and leans against it with his eyes tightly shut, only to see familiar words emblazoned across his eyelids. He lied to us.
When Pal had asked Gideon if she knew what these revelations meant, really meant, she had said she did, but Palamedes doesn’t think that’s quite true. It isn’t her fault; Pal hasn’t expounded much on those last few minutes of his life, telling himself it is because he doesn’t have enough evidence to support his theories, but knowing, deep down, that his avoidance has a lot more to do with his own fears.
Still, they all understand pieces of it: Cam knows nearly as well as he does how they had picked at the lyctorhood theorem, trying to make it less awful in its conclusions, trying to make it right; Harrow, in her wild effort to keep some piece of Gideon whole, had, as usual, found a solution by awful instinct; Gideon, poor Gideon, now knows more intimately than all of them the sort of indifference their God is capable of.
Now, Palamedes Sextus has to put it all together and present his awful, terrifying, wonderful conclusion.
He sits down at the desk in the corner of the room and begins to write.
He doesn’t stop until morning.
no subject
"I never said it didn't," he answers cheerfully. "If I'm entirely honest, we may never know for sure if Gideon's soul remained intact thanks to that stupid," yes, he said it, "attempt at brain surgery, or some underlying tendency of the theorem. Gideon's story proves that the power of the lyctoral well may be available without a dead cavalier to fuel it, but, unfortunately, not how. And it's not like we can run a double-blind study." He makes a face, able to imagine a couple of scholars who would be happy to do just that, even if their proposals never made it through review.
"Though I hate to admit it, the lobotomy may have helped. Leave it to Harrow to discover the most ham-fisted way of doing something brilliant. But--" and now he picks up his notebook from his desk and brandishes it. The top is labeled GIDEON PRIME // PYRRHA DVE, followed by a page full of half written, quickly abandoned theorems. "Our Ninth House friends are not the only ones to have found themselves in such circumstances."