>>5900525To your surprise, you mean it. You find yourself disoriented in this place, answering these questions, but more than that you feel excited by the implications. It isn’t just shopping for clothes which has been difficult these last few months: your inability to reliably maintain your solid state has interfered in everything. You’ve dropped dishes, fumbled with material components, slipped through floors and fallen through walls, dropped your wand in deadly duels… To say nothing of the Sylvare situation. To regain control of your body would be amazing in and of itself, even if it just let you live a normal life once more. But to think it could grant you FLIGHT?
Needless to say, this was the subject which you first set your mind to, when you entered the holy halls of the Sacrae Scholae Lunae.
You had expected from the name and the atmosphere something not unlike the Mages’ Tower of Hawksong, or the equivalent Great Tree in Iternagreyn: a school, with lecturers, and lessons, and proctors. You find no such thing, nor is the Scholae a great library of books. Rather, you find a vast and haphazardly arranged lounge, spreading out in patterns incomprehensible at first to your sense of spatial organization. Here and there, groups of eladrin sit—inside, outside, in liminal spaces between the two—and form circles which seem almost meditative in their shared, meaningful silence. Some of them carry crystal rectangles (‘marqs’, as you now know they are called) and occasionally gaze down upon them as images and words flicker across the surface.
“The eladrin live long lives, but we never stop learning,” Nym explains.
“We all learn different things, and at different speeds,” Devi expands. “We are all proctors, all professors, all tecahers…”
“And all students,” Nym adds. “We all learn. We all teach.”
“I… See,” you lie.
In truth, it’s a little foreign to you, used to systems of apprenticeship and the authority of experienced elders as a mechanism of instruction. Then again, you’re no stranger to self-guided learning pursuits. It’s just that those were always secretive, faintly illicit, largely solitary pursuits. Izirina has been your fellow-traveller down those avenues of education, now and then, but just as often you were investigating HER, or adoptive mother. At other times, you were forced to keep her at arm’s length, to protect her from misplaced hope and misguided and premature action.
(Not that THAT worked out for you…)
“Well, when on the moon, do as the moon-elves do,” you muse aloud. “Lead the way.”
The two moon-elves serving as your guides exchange a look, as you realize your own mistake: this is a method of teaching and learning which HAS no leader.
“Or, you know,” you finish lamely, “whatever.”
