Magic Under Construction TOMU 2-21
Jul. 15th, 2011 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerin0.5 Hours: 400 words
1 Hour: 900 words.
1.5 Hours: 1400 words.
2 Hours: 1900 words.
2.5 Hours: 2800 words... wait, did I writeOVER 9000 words in half an hour, or did I miss half an hour in there somewhere? Maybe I need to start logging start/stop times if I'm interested in tracking this.
Note: This is the first chapter of a new book, hence the somewhat conversational and retrospective opening.
[2 hours in. Shaping up nicely.]
There's an elven saying that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I think I have kind of a unique perspective on that saying.
On the one hand, I had always been of the opinion that the gods didn't actually concern themselves with targeting individual people for destruction. The evidence for this seemed pretty abundant. As a half-demon, I was well aware that the great god Khersis was all for the destruction of demonkind, and yet living demons still existed in the world. So either he was working his way alphabetically down a very long list of them, or else his approach was a bit more distant and scattered.
On the other hand, I'd had a major goddess mention me during a TV interview. So at the very least the divine powers might take an interest in a mortal if they're dating one of her daughters.
So far, she hadn't driven me insane that I've noticed. Though she also hadn't made up her mind about Amaranth and me. The feeling of an axe blade (or meteor) hanging over my head that had accompanied knowing that she was weighing me in the balance had long since dissipated. Tension had given way to frustration and then a feeling of something that wasn't quite apathy and wasn't quite acceptance, but that had qualities of both.
Mother Khaele had been judging my relationship with Amaranth for most of the time we'd been together. The knowledge that at any time she might step in to end it was just part of the normal state of affairs. According to Amaranth, this sort of thing wasn't at all unusual for her... the great goddess of nature apparently still considered the matter of what to do with all the people who were cluttering up her ecosystem to be an open question.
While knowing that was not precisely reassuring in a big picture sense, it certainly gave me some perspective. I was content to let her ponder the nature of my relationship with Amaranth at her leisure.
Anyway, if the gods... in the sense of vast and distant implacable forces of fate rather than actual individual gods... were going to destroy someone, I'm not sure they'd bother delivering madness beforehand. Any kind of mental imbalance worthy of being a divine curse would probably count as destruction anyway. I think if the gods were going to adjust someone's mind as a prelude to classical hubris-smiting, they would first make their victim complacent. Complacent targets would not only be easier to hit, but could be liable to destroy themselves.
I ended the second day of classes on my sophomore year feeling pretty good about things... I'd made it through all my classes once and felt like there was nothing I couldn't handle. I was especially relieved that the two classes that were the furthest outside my comfort zone... a fighting class and one on design aesthetics... seemed totally doable.
With all my worrying focused on them, though, I'd kind of forgotten to keep an eye inside my comfort zone. That made what happened next a little bit like being stabbed in the back by a trusted friend.
I woke up Wednesday with plenty of time to do the reading for my first class of the day, spellbinding. As an applied enchantment major, this sort of thing was going to be my bread and butter out in the post-college real world.
Or it would be my bread and butter if I were the sort of person who needed to eat food. Somehow the existing saying seemed safer than "my virgin blood".
Whatever spellbinding was metaphorically, I still ate it up. In the first day of class we'd learned nothing more than an exhaustive list of safety requirements and a few simple techniques for working with our classroom tools. But since our classroom tools were things like wands and powerstones that we made ourselves, those few scraps were like a tantalizing glimpse into a future of awesome possibilties.
I'd rushed out after class to try to get a head start on the practical side of our first assignment, and made some pretty decent headway. The reading I'd left for later, because... it's reading.
It's not that I don't like to read, because I do. I love reading, even geeky texts on highly technical subjects. Twelve pages of reading is nothing to me.
And that, of course, is why I'd let it slide until the day of class. "Read twelve pages" isn't even a requirement. In high school it's the sort of thing I might have done between bells immediately before the class where it was due, assuming I hadn't already read the textbook in its entirety because hey, I'd been carrying around that book all year and that's what happens.
But I'd only got my textbooks a week before class started, and I didn't tote it around everywhere during that time. The spellbinding text was such a slim-looking volume, soft-covered and with holes for a three-ring binder... more like a workbook or a manual than a textbook. When I had first looked through it, I'd thought the technical drawings and spell diagrams and runic notations were all very cool.
What I'd missed was that it was pretty much only those things. The paragraphs of explanatory prose were tiny and cramped and just sort of shoved in wherever there was enough room for them. It's not that I couldn't deal with that kind of thing, but it changed the nature of the assignment... deciphering and digesting twelve pages of magical techniques and theories that were more advanced than anything I'd mastered was quite a different matter than reading twelve pages of text talking about those techniques and theories. The amount of time and attention it required was a lot higher, and there was less room to rush or fudge anything.
Amaranth came out of the bathroom while I was trying to get an initial grip on the material, talking about her plans for the day. Her long golden hair was wet, but it was drying quickly and it had lost none of its slightly curly volume under the weight of the water. She had a towel under her feet that she was moving by shuffling it along, so she wouldn't drip on the rug. She didn't need to wrap one around her for utility because even water couldn't stick to her skin for long... or for modesty, because she had none.
As a nymph, nudity was her natural state of being... more so than for most people, anyway.
"Amaranth" wasn't exactly her name, it was the name of the plant that grew in her fieldThat is, the field that was her. Her actual name was more of a sensory impression, of sun and wind and scent.
The body she used for walking around had never needed a separate name until she decided to enroll in college. That form had been created in the image of a human woman, according to her human propagators' ideals about perfection. She liked to say that beauty was subjective. I think it's easy for someone with perfect beauty to say that. In any case, the farmers who'd put a bit of themselves into her creation must have had similar tastes to me, because I couldn't imagine anyone more stunning: tall, at least in comparison to me.
A little broad across the shoulders, but quite a bit broader at the hips. Her waist wasn't tiny, but I'd never understood the need or point of a tiny waist. Her breasts would probably have been the first thing I noticed about her, though, anyway, even if they weren't uncovered. And if she hadn't been wearing a Khersian holy symbol pinned to one of them the first time I met her.
It had been painful for me to look at, in more ways than one.
She'd described it as an act of religious tolerance, but from what I'd learned of her since then, it seemed more likely that she was testing the limits with her divine mother.
"What's wrong, sweetie?" Amaranth asked after []
She frowned as I stumbled over an explanation.
"Well, I hope that teaches you something about leaving your homework to the last minute," she said.
"I know not to do that," I said. "But I always considered assigned reading to be different."
"Then I hope you've learned a lesson about that," she said. "You don't suppose you'll be too badly off if you're a little behind the rest of the class on the second day, do you?"
"Probably not," I said. "Especially since I can't be the only one who didn't think to get a jump on it, and there will be at least a few people who didn't bother to read it at all."
"Do you really want to be comparing yourself to them?" Amaranth asked.
"No," I said. "Not really... and I don't want to be even a little behind, either. Is it okay if I skip breakfast today? I'd like to get through as much of this as I can, as well as I can, before class."
"Okay, baby," Amaranth said. "But don't make a habit of it. I know you spent most of the summer alone and focused on your classes, but you need your social time, even if you don't need meals."
"Thank you," I said. She gave me a kiss before heading through the shared bathroom to the adjoining room in our dorm suite, where Two and Dee were waiting.
I was dimly aware of her explaining the situation to them, though this was largely an orchestrated bit of politeness. With the doors open, conversations in one of the two rooms were pretty audible to people in the other room even if they didn't have Dee's elven hearing.
Then I heard the other room's door open and close, and I was alone in the suite.
Alone, the manual didn't seem as daunting. It was like my mind had space to stretch out. To say that I enjoyed Amaranth's company was an understatement, but we had very different study habits.
She liked to talk things out, thinking out loud while flitting from topic to topic and book to book. If I had been reading for pleasure or gazing the ethernet through one of the crystal balls in the school library, that sort of thing would have provided a pleasant and interesting background noise. She hadn't exactly been talking seven leagues a step while I'd been trying to read the text, but it hadn't occured to her that I might be distracted by even light conversation, because she wouldn't have been.
And of course, because I hadn't told her... I hadn't really thought about it until I found myself alone, though, so I made a mental note to let her know that I might need some quiet time to myself when it came to spellbinding.
[]
[1.5 hours in. Needs description/clarification for Amaranth, as this is a new book, but going well all the same.]
There's an elven saying that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I think I have kind of a unique perspective on that saying.
On the one hand, I had always been of the opinion that the gods didn't actually concern themselves with targeting individual people for destruction. The evidence for this seemed pretty abundant. As a half-demon, I was well aware that the great god Khersis was all for the destruction of demonkind, and yet living demons still existed in the world. So either he was working his way alphabetically down a very long list of them, or else his approach was a bit more distant and scattered.
On the other hand, I'd had a major goddess mention me during a TV interview. So at the very least the divine powers might take an interest in a mortal if they're dating one of her daughters.
So far, she hadn't driven me insane that I've noticed. Though she also hadn't made up her mind about Amaranth and me. The feeling of an axe blade (or meteor) hanging over my head that had accompanied knowing that she was weighing me in the balance had long since dissipated. Tension had given way to frustration and then a feeling of something that wasn't quite apathy and wasn't quite acceptance, but that had qualities of both.
Mother Khaele had been judging my relationship with Amaranth for most of the time we'd been together. The knowledge that at any time she might step in to end it was just part of the normal state of affairs. According to Amaranth, this sort of thing wasn't at all unusual for her... the great goddess of nature apparently still considered the matter of what to do with all the people who were cluttering up her ecosystem to be an open question.
While knowing that was not precisely reassuring in a big picture sense, it certainly gave me some perspective. I was content to let her ponder the nature of my relationship with Amaranth at her leisure.
Anyway, if the gods... in the sense of vast and distant implacable forces of fate rather than actual individual gods... were going to destroy someone, I'm not sure they'd bother delivering madness beforehand. Any kind of mental imbalance worthy of being a divine curse would probably count as destruction anyway. I think if the gods were going to adjust someone's mind as a prelude to classical hubris-smiting, they would first make their victim complacent. Complacent targets would not only be easier to hit, but could be liable to destroy themselves.
I ended the second day of classes on my sophomore year feeling pretty good about things... I'd made it through all my classes once and felt like there was nothing I couldn't handle. I was especially relieved that the two classes that were the furthest outside my comfort zone... a fighting class and one on design aesthetics... seemed totally doable.
With all my worrying focused on them, though, I'd kind of forgotten to keep an eye inside my comfort zone. That made what happened next a little bit like being stabbed in the back by a trusted friend.
I woke up Wednesday with plenty of time to do the reading for my first class of the day, spellbinding. As an applied enchantment major, this sort of thing was going to be my bread and butter out in the post-college real world.
Or it would be my bread and butter if I were the sort of person who needed to eat food. Somehow the existing saying seemed safer than "my virgin blood".
Whatever spellbinding was metaphorically, I still ate it up. In the first day of class we'd learned nothing more than an exhaustive list of safety requirements and a few simple techniques for working with our classroom tools. But since our classroom tools were things like wands and powerstones that we made ourselves, those few scraps were like a tantalizing glimpse into a future of awesome possibilties.
I'd rushed out after class to try to get a head start on the practical side of our first assignment, and made some pretty decent headway. The reading I'd left for later, because... it's reading.
It's not that I don't like to read, because I do. I love reading, even geeky texts on highly technical subjects. Twelve pages of reading is nothing to me.
And that, of course, is why I'd let it slide until the day of class. "Read twelve pages" isn't even a requirement. In high school it's the sort of thing I might have done between bells immediately before the class where it was due, assuming I hadn't already read the textbook in its entirety because hey, I'd been carrying around that book all year and that's what happens.
But I'd only got my textbooks a week before class started, and I didn't tote it around everywhere during that time. The spellbinding text was such a slim-looking volume, soft-covered and with holes for a three-ring binder... more like a workbook or a manual than a textbook. When I had first looked through it, I'd thought the technical drawings and spell diagrams and runic notations were all very cool.
What I'd missed was that it was pretty much only those things. The paragraphs of explanatory prose were tiny and cramped and just sort of shoved in wherever there was enough room for them. It's not that I couldn't deal with that kind of thing, but it changed the nature of the assignment... deciphering and digesting twelve pages of magical techniques and theories that were more advanced than anything I'd mastered was quite a different matter than reading twelve pages of text talking about those techniques and theories. The amount of time and attention it required was a lot higher, and there was less room to rush or fudge anything.
"What's wrong, sweetie?" Amaranth asked after I let out some kind of groan when I discovered this just before we would have left for breakfast on Wednesday morning.
She frowned as I stumbled over an explanation.
"Well, I hope that teaches you something about leaving your homework to the last minute," she said.
"I know not to do that," I said. "But I always considered assigned reading to be different."
"Then I hope you've learned a lesson about that," she said. "You don't suppose you'll be too badly off if you're a little behind the rest of the class on the second day, do you?"
"Probably not," I said. "Especially since I can't be the only one who didn't think to get a jump on it, and there will be at least a few people who didn't bother to read it at all."
"Do you really want to be comparing yourself to them?" Amaranth asked.
"No," I said. "Not really... and I don't want to be even a little behind, either. Is it okay if I skip breakfast today? I'd like to get through as much of this as I can, as well as I can, before class."
"Okay, baby," Amaranth said. "But don't make a habit of it. I know you spent most of the summer alone and focused on your classes, but you need your social time, even if you don't need meals."
"Thank you," I said. She gave me a kiss before heading through the shared bathroom to the adjoining room in our dorm suite, where Two and Dee were waiting.
I was dimly aware of her explaining the situation to them, though this was largely an orchestrated bit of politeness. With the doors open, conversations in one of the two rooms were pretty audible to people in the other room even if they didn't have Dee's elven hearing.
Then I heard the other room's door open and close, and I was alone in the suite.
Alone, the manual didn't seem as daunting. It was like my mind had space to stretch out. To say that I enjoyed Amaranth's company was an understatement, but we had very different study habits. She liked to talk things out, thinking out loud while flitting from topic to topic and book to book. Somehow that helped her retain things.
[1 hour in.]
There's an elven saying that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I think I have kind of a unique perspective on that saying.
On the one hand, I had always been of the opinion that the gods didn't actually concern themselves with targeting individual people for destruction. The evidence for this seemed pretty abundant. As a half-demon, I was well aware that the great god Khersis was all for the destruction of demonkind, and yet living demons still existed in the world. So either he was working his way alphabetically down a very long list of them, or else his approach was a bit more distant and scattered.
On the other hand, I'd had a major goddess mention me during a TV interview. So at the very least the divine powers might take an interest in a mortal if they're dating one of her daughters.
So far, she hadn't driven me insane that I've noticed. Though she also hadn't made up her mind about Amaranth and me. The feeling of an axe blade (or meteor) hanging over my head that had accompanied knowing that she was weighing me in the balance had long since dissipated. Tension had given way to frustration and then a feeling of something that wasn't quite apathy and wasn't quite acceptance, but that had qualities of both.
Mother Khaele had been judging my relationship with Amaranth for most of the time we'd been together. The knowledge that at any time she might step in to end it was just part of the normal state of affairs. According to Amaranth, this sort of thing wasn't at all unusual for her... the great goddess of nature apparently still considered the matter of what to do with all the people who were cluttering up her ecosystem to be an open question.
While knowing that was not precisely reassuring in a big picture sense, it certainly gave me some perspective. I was content to let her ponder the nature of my relationship with Amaranth at her leisure.
Anyway, if the gods... in the sense of vast and distant implacable forces of fate rather than actual individual gods... were going to destroy someone, I'm not sure they'd bother delivering madness beforehand. Any kind of mental imbalance worthy of being a divine curse would probably count as destruction anyway. I think if the gods were going to adjust someone's mind as a prelude to classical hubris-smiting, they would first make their victim complacent. Complacent targets would not only be easier to hit, but could be liable to destroy themselves.
I ended the second day of classes on my sophomore year feeling pretty good about things... I'd made it through all my classes once and felt like there was nothing I couldn't handle. I was especially relieved that the two classes that were the furthest outside my comfort zone... a fighting class and one on design aesthetics... seemed totally doable.
With all my worrying focused on them, though, I'd kind of forgotten to keep an eye inside my comfort zone.
I woke up Wednesday with plenty of time to do the reading for my first class of the day, spellbinding. As an applied enchantment major, this sort of thing was going to be my bread and butter out in the post-college real world.
Or it would be my bread and butter if I were the sort of person who needed to eat food. Somehow the existing saying seemed safer than "my virgin blood".
Whatever spellbinding was metaphorically, I still ate it up. In the first day of class we'd learned nothing more than an exhaustive list of safety requirements and a few simple techniques for working with our classroom tools. But since our classroom tools were things like wands and powerstones that we made ourselves, those few scraps were like a tantalizing glimpse into a future of awesome possibilties.
I'd rushed out after class to try to get a head start on the practical side of our first assignment, and made some pretty decent headway. The reading I'd left for later, because... it's reading.
It's not that I don't like to read, because I do. I love reading, even geeky texts on highly technical subjects. Twelve pages of reading is nothing to me.
And that, of course, is why I'd let it slide until the day of class. "Read twelve pages" isn't even a requirement. In high school it's the sort of thing I might have done between bells immediately before the class where it was due, assuming I hadn't already read the textbook in its entirety because hey, I'd been carrying around that book all year and that's what happens.
But I'd only got my textbooks a week before class started, and I didn't tote it around everywhere during that time. The spellbinding text was such a slim-looking volume, soft-covered and with holes for a three-ring binder... more like a workbook or a manual than a textbook. When I had first looked through it, I'd thought the technical drawings and spell diagrams and runic notations were all very cool.
What I'd missed was that it was pretty much only those things. The paragraphs of explanatory prose were tiny and cramped and just sort of shoved in wherever there was enough room for them.
[0.5 hours]
There's an elven saying that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I think I have kind of a unique perspective on that saying.
On the one hand, I had always been of the opinion that the gods didn't actually concern themselves with targeting individual people for destruction. The evidence for this seemed pretty abundant. As a half-demon, I was well aware that the great god Khersis was all for the destruction of demonkind, and yet living demons still existed in the world. So either he was working his way alphabetically down a very long list of them, or else his approach was a bit more distant and scattered.
On the other hand, I'd had a major goddess mention me during a TV interview. So at the very least the divine powers might take an interest in a mortal if they're dating one of her daughters.
So far, she hadn't driven me insane that I've noticed. Though she also hadn't made up her mind about Amaranth and me. The feeling of an axe blade (or meteor) hanging over my head that had accompanied knowing that she was weighing me in the balance had long since dissipated. Tension had given way to frustration and then a feeling of something that wasn't quite apathy and wasn't quite acceptance, but that had qualities of both.
Mother Khaele had been judging my relationship with Amaranth for most of the time we'd been together. The knowledge that at any time she might step in to end it was just part of the normal state of affairs. According to Amaranth, this sort of thing wasn't at all unusual for her... the great goddess of nature apparently still considered the matter of what to do with all the people who were cluttering up her ecosystem to be an open question.
While knowing that was not precisely reassuring in a big picture sense, it certainly gave me some perspective. I was content to let her ponder the nature of my relationship with Amaranth at her leisure.
Anyway, if the "gods" in the sense of vast and distant implacable forces of fate were going to destroy someone, I'm not sure they'd bother delivering madness beforehand. Any kind of mental imbalance worthy of being a divine curse would probably count as destruction anyway. I think if the gods were going to adjust someone's mind as a prelude to classical hubris-smiting, they would first make their target complacent.
1 Hour: 900 words.
1.5 Hours: 1400 words.
2 Hours: 1900 words.
2.5 Hours: 2800 words... wait, did I write
Note: This is the first chapter of a new book, hence the somewhat conversational and retrospective opening.
[2 hours in. Shaping up nicely.]
There's an elven saying that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I think I have kind of a unique perspective on that saying.
On the one hand, I had always been of the opinion that the gods didn't actually concern themselves with targeting individual people for destruction. The evidence for this seemed pretty abundant. As a half-demon, I was well aware that the great god Khersis was all for the destruction of demonkind, and yet living demons still existed in the world. So either he was working his way alphabetically down a very long list of them, or else his approach was a bit more distant and scattered.
On the other hand, I'd had a major goddess mention me during a TV interview. So at the very least the divine powers might take an interest in a mortal if they're dating one of her daughters.
So far, she hadn't driven me insane that I've noticed. Though she also hadn't made up her mind about Amaranth and me. The feeling of an axe blade (or meteor) hanging over my head that had accompanied knowing that she was weighing me in the balance had long since dissipated. Tension had given way to frustration and then a feeling of something that wasn't quite apathy and wasn't quite acceptance, but that had qualities of both.
Mother Khaele had been judging my relationship with Amaranth for most of the time we'd been together. The knowledge that at any time she might step in to end it was just part of the normal state of affairs. According to Amaranth, this sort of thing wasn't at all unusual for her... the great goddess of nature apparently still considered the matter of what to do with all the people who were cluttering up her ecosystem to be an open question.
While knowing that was not precisely reassuring in a big picture sense, it certainly gave me some perspective. I was content to let her ponder the nature of my relationship with Amaranth at her leisure.
Anyway, if the gods... in the sense of vast and distant implacable forces of fate rather than actual individual gods... were going to destroy someone, I'm not sure they'd bother delivering madness beforehand. Any kind of mental imbalance worthy of being a divine curse would probably count as destruction anyway. I think if the gods were going to adjust someone's mind as a prelude to classical hubris-smiting, they would first make their victim complacent. Complacent targets would not only be easier to hit, but could be liable to destroy themselves.
I ended the second day of classes on my sophomore year feeling pretty good about things... I'd made it through all my classes once and felt like there was nothing I couldn't handle. I was especially relieved that the two classes that were the furthest outside my comfort zone... a fighting class and one on design aesthetics... seemed totally doable.
With all my worrying focused on them, though, I'd kind of forgotten to keep an eye inside my comfort zone. That made what happened next a little bit like being stabbed in the back by a trusted friend.
I woke up Wednesday with plenty of time to do the reading for my first class of the day, spellbinding. As an applied enchantment major, this sort of thing was going to be my bread and butter out in the post-college real world.
Or it would be my bread and butter if I were the sort of person who needed to eat food. Somehow the existing saying seemed safer than "my virgin blood".
Whatever spellbinding was metaphorically, I still ate it up. In the first day of class we'd learned nothing more than an exhaustive list of safety requirements and a few simple techniques for working with our classroom tools. But since our classroom tools were things like wands and powerstones that we made ourselves, those few scraps were like a tantalizing glimpse into a future of awesome possibilties.
I'd rushed out after class to try to get a head start on the practical side of our first assignment, and made some pretty decent headway. The reading I'd left for later, because... it's reading.
It's not that I don't like to read, because I do. I love reading, even geeky texts on highly technical subjects. Twelve pages of reading is nothing to me.
And that, of course, is why I'd let it slide until the day of class. "Read twelve pages" isn't even a requirement. In high school it's the sort of thing I might have done between bells immediately before the class where it was due, assuming I hadn't already read the textbook in its entirety because hey, I'd been carrying around that book all year and that's what happens.
But I'd only got my textbooks a week before class started, and I didn't tote it around everywhere during that time. The spellbinding text was such a slim-looking volume, soft-covered and with holes for a three-ring binder... more like a workbook or a manual than a textbook. When I had first looked through it, I'd thought the technical drawings and spell diagrams and runic notations were all very cool.
What I'd missed was that it was pretty much only those things. The paragraphs of explanatory prose were tiny and cramped and just sort of shoved in wherever there was enough room for them. It's not that I couldn't deal with that kind of thing, but it changed the nature of the assignment... deciphering and digesting twelve pages of magical techniques and theories that were more advanced than anything I'd mastered was quite a different matter than reading twelve pages of text talking about those techniques and theories. The amount of time and attention it required was a lot higher, and there was less room to rush or fudge anything.
Amaranth came out of the bathroom while I was trying to get an initial grip on the material, talking about her plans for the day. Her long golden hair was wet, but it was drying quickly and it had lost none of its slightly curly volume under the weight of the water. She had a towel under her feet that she was moving by shuffling it along, so she wouldn't drip on the rug. She didn't need to wrap one around her for utility because even water couldn't stick to her skin for long... or for modesty, because she had none.
As a nymph, nudity was her natural state of being... more so than for most people, anyway.
"Amaranth" wasn't exactly her name, it was the name of the plant that grew in her fieldThat is, the field that was her. Her actual name was more of a sensory impression, of sun and wind and scent.
The body she used for walking around had never needed a separate name until she decided to enroll in college. That form had been created in the image of a human woman, according to her human propagators' ideals about perfection. She liked to say that beauty was subjective. I think it's easy for someone with perfect beauty to say that. In any case, the farmers who'd put a bit of themselves into her creation must have had similar tastes to me, because I couldn't imagine anyone more stunning: tall, at least in comparison to me.
A little broad across the shoulders, but quite a bit broader at the hips. Her waist wasn't tiny, but I'd never understood the need or point of a tiny waist. Her breasts would probably have been the first thing I noticed about her, though, anyway, even if they weren't uncovered. And if she hadn't been wearing a Khersian holy symbol pinned to one of them the first time I met her.
It had been painful for me to look at, in more ways than one.
She'd described it as an act of religious tolerance, but from what I'd learned of her since then, it seemed more likely that she was testing the limits with her divine mother.
"What's wrong, sweetie?" Amaranth asked after []
She frowned as I stumbled over an explanation.
"Well, I hope that teaches you something about leaving your homework to the last minute," she said.
"I know not to do that," I said. "But I always considered assigned reading to be different."
"Then I hope you've learned a lesson about that," she said. "You don't suppose you'll be too badly off if you're a little behind the rest of the class on the second day, do you?"
"Probably not," I said. "Especially since I can't be the only one who didn't think to get a jump on it, and there will be at least a few people who didn't bother to read it at all."
"Do you really want to be comparing yourself to them?" Amaranth asked.
"No," I said. "Not really... and I don't want to be even a little behind, either. Is it okay if I skip breakfast today? I'd like to get through as much of this as I can, as well as I can, before class."
"Okay, baby," Amaranth said. "But don't make a habit of it. I know you spent most of the summer alone and focused on your classes, but you need your social time, even if you don't need meals."
"Thank you," I said. She gave me a kiss before heading through the shared bathroom to the adjoining room in our dorm suite, where Two and Dee were waiting.
I was dimly aware of her explaining the situation to them, though this was largely an orchestrated bit of politeness. With the doors open, conversations in one of the two rooms were pretty audible to people in the other room even if they didn't have Dee's elven hearing.
Then I heard the other room's door open and close, and I was alone in the suite.
Alone, the manual didn't seem as daunting. It was like my mind had space to stretch out. To say that I enjoyed Amaranth's company was an understatement, but we had very different study habits.
She liked to talk things out, thinking out loud while flitting from topic to topic and book to book. If I had been reading for pleasure or gazing the ethernet through one of the crystal balls in the school library, that sort of thing would have provided a pleasant and interesting background noise. She hadn't exactly been talking seven leagues a step while I'd been trying to read the text, but it hadn't occured to her that I might be distracted by even light conversation, because she wouldn't have been.
And of course, because I hadn't told her... I hadn't really thought about it until I found myself alone, though, so I made a mental note to let her know that I might need some quiet time to myself when it came to spellbinding.
[]
[1.5 hours in. Needs description/clarification for Amaranth, as this is a new book, but going well all the same.]
There's an elven saying that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I think I have kind of a unique perspective on that saying.
On the one hand, I had always been of the opinion that the gods didn't actually concern themselves with targeting individual people for destruction. The evidence for this seemed pretty abundant. As a half-demon, I was well aware that the great god Khersis was all for the destruction of demonkind, and yet living demons still existed in the world. So either he was working his way alphabetically down a very long list of them, or else his approach was a bit more distant and scattered.
On the other hand, I'd had a major goddess mention me during a TV interview. So at the very least the divine powers might take an interest in a mortal if they're dating one of her daughters.
So far, she hadn't driven me insane that I've noticed. Though she also hadn't made up her mind about Amaranth and me. The feeling of an axe blade (or meteor) hanging over my head that had accompanied knowing that she was weighing me in the balance had long since dissipated. Tension had given way to frustration and then a feeling of something that wasn't quite apathy and wasn't quite acceptance, but that had qualities of both.
Mother Khaele had been judging my relationship with Amaranth for most of the time we'd been together. The knowledge that at any time she might step in to end it was just part of the normal state of affairs. According to Amaranth, this sort of thing wasn't at all unusual for her... the great goddess of nature apparently still considered the matter of what to do with all the people who were cluttering up her ecosystem to be an open question.
While knowing that was not precisely reassuring in a big picture sense, it certainly gave me some perspective. I was content to let her ponder the nature of my relationship with Amaranth at her leisure.
Anyway, if the gods... in the sense of vast and distant implacable forces of fate rather than actual individual gods... were going to destroy someone, I'm not sure they'd bother delivering madness beforehand. Any kind of mental imbalance worthy of being a divine curse would probably count as destruction anyway. I think if the gods were going to adjust someone's mind as a prelude to classical hubris-smiting, they would first make their victim complacent. Complacent targets would not only be easier to hit, but could be liable to destroy themselves.
I ended the second day of classes on my sophomore year feeling pretty good about things... I'd made it through all my classes once and felt like there was nothing I couldn't handle. I was especially relieved that the two classes that were the furthest outside my comfort zone... a fighting class and one on design aesthetics... seemed totally doable.
With all my worrying focused on them, though, I'd kind of forgotten to keep an eye inside my comfort zone. That made what happened next a little bit like being stabbed in the back by a trusted friend.
I woke up Wednesday with plenty of time to do the reading for my first class of the day, spellbinding. As an applied enchantment major, this sort of thing was going to be my bread and butter out in the post-college real world.
Or it would be my bread and butter if I were the sort of person who needed to eat food. Somehow the existing saying seemed safer than "my virgin blood".
Whatever spellbinding was metaphorically, I still ate it up. In the first day of class we'd learned nothing more than an exhaustive list of safety requirements and a few simple techniques for working with our classroom tools. But since our classroom tools were things like wands and powerstones that we made ourselves, those few scraps were like a tantalizing glimpse into a future of awesome possibilties.
I'd rushed out after class to try to get a head start on the practical side of our first assignment, and made some pretty decent headway. The reading I'd left for later, because... it's reading.
It's not that I don't like to read, because I do. I love reading, even geeky texts on highly technical subjects. Twelve pages of reading is nothing to me.
And that, of course, is why I'd let it slide until the day of class. "Read twelve pages" isn't even a requirement. In high school it's the sort of thing I might have done between bells immediately before the class where it was due, assuming I hadn't already read the textbook in its entirety because hey, I'd been carrying around that book all year and that's what happens.
But I'd only got my textbooks a week before class started, and I didn't tote it around everywhere during that time. The spellbinding text was such a slim-looking volume, soft-covered and with holes for a three-ring binder... more like a workbook or a manual than a textbook. When I had first looked through it, I'd thought the technical drawings and spell diagrams and runic notations were all very cool.
What I'd missed was that it was pretty much only those things. The paragraphs of explanatory prose were tiny and cramped and just sort of shoved in wherever there was enough room for them. It's not that I couldn't deal with that kind of thing, but it changed the nature of the assignment... deciphering and digesting twelve pages of magical techniques and theories that were more advanced than anything I'd mastered was quite a different matter than reading twelve pages of text talking about those techniques and theories. The amount of time and attention it required was a lot higher, and there was less room to rush or fudge anything.
"What's wrong, sweetie?" Amaranth asked after I let out some kind of groan when I discovered this just before we would have left for breakfast on Wednesday morning.
She frowned as I stumbled over an explanation.
"Well, I hope that teaches you something about leaving your homework to the last minute," she said.
"I know not to do that," I said. "But I always considered assigned reading to be different."
"Then I hope you've learned a lesson about that," she said. "You don't suppose you'll be too badly off if you're a little behind the rest of the class on the second day, do you?"
"Probably not," I said. "Especially since I can't be the only one who didn't think to get a jump on it, and there will be at least a few people who didn't bother to read it at all."
"Do you really want to be comparing yourself to them?" Amaranth asked.
"No," I said. "Not really... and I don't want to be even a little behind, either. Is it okay if I skip breakfast today? I'd like to get through as much of this as I can, as well as I can, before class."
"Okay, baby," Amaranth said. "But don't make a habit of it. I know you spent most of the summer alone and focused on your classes, but you need your social time, even if you don't need meals."
"Thank you," I said. She gave me a kiss before heading through the shared bathroom to the adjoining room in our dorm suite, where Two and Dee were waiting.
I was dimly aware of her explaining the situation to them, though this was largely an orchestrated bit of politeness. With the doors open, conversations in one of the two rooms were pretty audible to people in the other room even if they didn't have Dee's elven hearing.
Then I heard the other room's door open and close, and I was alone in the suite.
Alone, the manual didn't seem as daunting. It was like my mind had space to stretch out. To say that I enjoyed Amaranth's company was an understatement, but we had very different study habits. She liked to talk things out, thinking out loud while flitting from topic to topic and book to book. Somehow that helped her retain things.
[1 hour in.]
There's an elven saying that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I think I have kind of a unique perspective on that saying.
On the one hand, I had always been of the opinion that the gods didn't actually concern themselves with targeting individual people for destruction. The evidence for this seemed pretty abundant. As a half-demon, I was well aware that the great god Khersis was all for the destruction of demonkind, and yet living demons still existed in the world. So either he was working his way alphabetically down a very long list of them, or else his approach was a bit more distant and scattered.
On the other hand, I'd had a major goddess mention me during a TV interview. So at the very least the divine powers might take an interest in a mortal if they're dating one of her daughters.
So far, she hadn't driven me insane that I've noticed. Though she also hadn't made up her mind about Amaranth and me. The feeling of an axe blade (or meteor) hanging over my head that had accompanied knowing that she was weighing me in the balance had long since dissipated. Tension had given way to frustration and then a feeling of something that wasn't quite apathy and wasn't quite acceptance, but that had qualities of both.
Mother Khaele had been judging my relationship with Amaranth for most of the time we'd been together. The knowledge that at any time she might step in to end it was just part of the normal state of affairs. According to Amaranth, this sort of thing wasn't at all unusual for her... the great goddess of nature apparently still considered the matter of what to do with all the people who were cluttering up her ecosystem to be an open question.
While knowing that was not precisely reassuring in a big picture sense, it certainly gave me some perspective. I was content to let her ponder the nature of my relationship with Amaranth at her leisure.
Anyway, if the gods... in the sense of vast and distant implacable forces of fate rather than actual individual gods... were going to destroy someone, I'm not sure they'd bother delivering madness beforehand. Any kind of mental imbalance worthy of being a divine curse would probably count as destruction anyway. I think if the gods were going to adjust someone's mind as a prelude to classical hubris-smiting, they would first make their victim complacent. Complacent targets would not only be easier to hit, but could be liable to destroy themselves.
I ended the second day of classes on my sophomore year feeling pretty good about things... I'd made it through all my classes once and felt like there was nothing I couldn't handle. I was especially relieved that the two classes that were the furthest outside my comfort zone... a fighting class and one on design aesthetics... seemed totally doable.
With all my worrying focused on them, though, I'd kind of forgotten to keep an eye inside my comfort zone.
I woke up Wednesday with plenty of time to do the reading for my first class of the day, spellbinding. As an applied enchantment major, this sort of thing was going to be my bread and butter out in the post-college real world.
Or it would be my bread and butter if I were the sort of person who needed to eat food. Somehow the existing saying seemed safer than "my virgin blood".
Whatever spellbinding was metaphorically, I still ate it up. In the first day of class we'd learned nothing more than an exhaustive list of safety requirements and a few simple techniques for working with our classroom tools. But since our classroom tools were things like wands and powerstones that we made ourselves, those few scraps were like a tantalizing glimpse into a future of awesome possibilties.
I'd rushed out after class to try to get a head start on the practical side of our first assignment, and made some pretty decent headway. The reading I'd left for later, because... it's reading.
It's not that I don't like to read, because I do. I love reading, even geeky texts on highly technical subjects. Twelve pages of reading is nothing to me.
And that, of course, is why I'd let it slide until the day of class. "Read twelve pages" isn't even a requirement. In high school it's the sort of thing I might have done between bells immediately before the class where it was due, assuming I hadn't already read the textbook in its entirety because hey, I'd been carrying around that book all year and that's what happens.
But I'd only got my textbooks a week before class started, and I didn't tote it around everywhere during that time. The spellbinding text was such a slim-looking volume, soft-covered and with holes for a three-ring binder... more like a workbook or a manual than a textbook. When I had first looked through it, I'd thought the technical drawings and spell diagrams and runic notations were all very cool.
What I'd missed was that it was pretty much only those things. The paragraphs of explanatory prose were tiny and cramped and just sort of shoved in wherever there was enough room for them.
[0.5 hours]
There's an elven saying that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I think I have kind of a unique perspective on that saying.
On the one hand, I had always been of the opinion that the gods didn't actually concern themselves with targeting individual people for destruction. The evidence for this seemed pretty abundant. As a half-demon, I was well aware that the great god Khersis was all for the destruction of demonkind, and yet living demons still existed in the world. So either he was working his way alphabetically down a very long list of them, or else his approach was a bit more distant and scattered.
On the other hand, I'd had a major goddess mention me during a TV interview. So at the very least the divine powers might take an interest in a mortal if they're dating one of her daughters.
So far, she hadn't driven me insane that I've noticed. Though she also hadn't made up her mind about Amaranth and me. The feeling of an axe blade (or meteor) hanging over my head that had accompanied knowing that she was weighing me in the balance had long since dissipated. Tension had given way to frustration and then a feeling of something that wasn't quite apathy and wasn't quite acceptance, but that had qualities of both.
Mother Khaele had been judging my relationship with Amaranth for most of the time we'd been together. The knowledge that at any time she might step in to end it was just part of the normal state of affairs. According to Amaranth, this sort of thing wasn't at all unusual for her... the great goddess of nature apparently still considered the matter of what to do with all the people who were cluttering up her ecosystem to be an open question.
While knowing that was not precisely reassuring in a big picture sense, it certainly gave me some perspective. I was content to let her ponder the nature of my relationship with Amaranth at her leisure.
Anyway, if the "gods" in the sense of vast and distant implacable forces of fate were going to destroy someone, I'm not sure they'd bother delivering madness beforehand. Any kind of mental imbalance worthy of being a divine curse would probably count as destruction anyway. I think if the gods were going to adjust someone's mind as a prelude to classical hubris-smiting, they would first make their target complacent.