Story

Tal had grown up among the Orlanthi of the Grey Heron clan, in the Colymar tribe. He knew his people's stories, obligations, gods, and old angers. This world was his. And yet something no longer quite held together.

It was not the certainty of a rebel. Tal had travelled too much for that.

His uncle Grimar, a merchant, had taken him on the roads of Tarsh when he was young. There he had discovered streets that resisted the rain, baths, statues, fabrics, great buildings, and a civilization sometimes capable of looking at several sides of the same conflict. He had loved these things. That was precisely the problem.

Because beneath the same Moon there were also slaves, domination, and the Crimson Bat.

His own people were right to hate some things about the Empire. Yet the Lunars were not only the monsters of clan stories. Tal no longer knew how to fit all these truths into a single story.

One evening on the way back from Tarsh, still young and excited, he had marvelled to Grimar about the buildings, the statues, the clothes — especially the women's clothes, he had added, blushing. His uncle had laughed, then grown more serious.

“Whenever you admire a great house, always ask yourself who carried the stones.”

Tal had never forgotten.

A road that was not Issaries'

Everyone might have assumed he would become a merchant. He already knew the roads, some Tarshite customs, the gestures of hospitality, and the price of caution far from home. Grimar loved him. His family had the means to help him take that path.

But goods bored him.

On the road, Tal asked why a stele stood where it did, who had lived there before, why the Tarshites told a familiar story differently from his clan, how two peoples could honour the same god and preserve different myths.

Behind all these questions another kept returning: how do you know what is true?

Lhankor Mhy thus began to look like a door. Not yet a vocation. A possibility.

The stone by the road

One day, as Tal was returning from Tarsh with Grimar, the wind was rising and the road ahead was still long. Beside it, an old stone had recently been uncovered from the earth. An old man stood before it, copying its marks onto a tablet.

Tal wanted to stop.

Grimar would rather have continued, but his nephew's curiosity, their years of travelling together, and the offer to share salt under the Heortling laws of hospitality finally won out.

Tal approached the old man.

The man handed him his tablet.

“Tell me what's wrong.”

Tal examined the stone, then the copy. He found seven differences.

The problem calmed him almost immediately. For a moment, the world became something that could be looked at precisely.

— The tablet is wrong, he concluded. The stone is older.

The old man looked up.

— Why not the stone?

Tal froze.

The stone was older than the tablet. It was not necessarily older than the man who had carved it. Perhaps the inscription itself copied something else. Perhaps it had been corrected, altered, or made to lie. Tal had leapt from an observed difference to a story he believed certain.

What he actually knew was smaller: the stone and the tablet did not say exactly the same thing.

The old man introduced himself: Hendrik, son of Enderos, Grey Sage of Lhankor Mhy.

Tal answered with a far too long genealogy: Tal, Talimar, son of Calimar and Urestona, carls of the Grey Heron, of the Colymar tribe.

Where a question compels you to go

Tal immediately questioned the Sage about his travels. Hendrik had read Lunar texts, spoken with their priests and scholars, travelled through Tarsh, Esrolia, Prax, part of the Holy Country, and met Westerners.

Eventually he pointed out that Tal kept asking how far he had gone, rather than what he had learned there.

— Because that's where I want to go too, Tal replied.

Hendrik shook his head.

“If all you want is to go far, stay with your uncle. Merchants travel more roads than many sages.”

Then he added:

“I go where a question compels me to go.”

That night, Tal spoke with Grimar for a long time.

At last he told him that he did not want trade. What he loved on the road was not what could be bought or sold, but what he did not yet understand.

An agreement became possible. His parents could provide his food, clothes, and writing materials; a contribution would be given to Hendrik; Tal would retain obligations toward his family and clan.

Hendrik, for his part, did not promise to make him a Grey Sage.

He promised to teach him to read, write, seek, distinguish what he knew from what he thought he knew, and preserve what others had learned. Only then would they discover whether he could become more.

A few weeks later, Tal left the Grey Heron. His mother packed his things. His father gave him an ancestral knife. Grimar entrusted him with a purse and far too much advice.

Hendrik handed him the tablet of the seven differences.

Then he asked his first question as a teacher:

“Where are we going?”

Tal immediately proposed a temple, a tablet repository, the Underworld, the edge of the world, the other Lightbringers, the place where the waters of the world fall, perhaps even victory over the Red Moon.

Hendrik walked on without answering.

Three accounts and two possible truths

Seasons later, Tal was still an apprentice when Hendrik placed before him three testimonies about the same conflict between clans.

They contradicted one another.

Tal read the first and quickly saw its bias. The second corrected some things and perhaps distorted others. The third opened yet another reading.

He managed to reconstruct a sequence that explained all three texts.

Then he stopped.

Another reconstruction was possible. It too explained all three testimonies.

The other apprentices waited for him to choose.

Tal refused.

He could show that both hypotheses held together. He could not pretend to know which was true.

From that day on, Hendrik looked at him differently. So did the other apprentices.

Tal had understood something difficult: “I don't know” is not the end of the search. Sometimes it is the first honest sentence of the search.

Why we write

Another day, Hendrik gathered his apprentices and told them to put their tablets aside.

— You'll write it later. First, you need to know why we write.

Then he told them of Lhankor Mhy.

The god was born of Orenoar, Mistress of Truth, upon Mostal, the Mountain of Law. Some traditions named Acos as his father; others the Mountain itself. Hendrik did not choose for his students.

He told how Lhankor Mhy knew cosmic Law, how the world entered the Darkness, how the Light of Knowledge vanished with Elasa, and how the god invented writing so that what had been learned could survive the absence of the one who had taught it.

He told of the Lightbringers.

And he insisted on something Tal did not expect: Lhankor Mhy sometimes succeeded. And sometimes he failed.

The god of knowledge was not a shortcut to a perfect answer.

Hendrik turned to Tal.

— You once said, “Only Lhankor Mhy knows.” Now that you know this story, why do you think he lets us seek?

Tal thought.

“Because even he, who knows everything, keeps searching. It is his quest; it is our quest.”

Hendrik remained silent.

— Yes.

It was one of the rare times he corrected nothing.

When Tal took up his tablet again, he did not record only the events of the myth. He wrote: distinguish what is true; remember what has been learned; preserve knowledge through writing; seek what is missing; continue searching even when one already knows.

Hendrik read over his shoulder.

— Keep them. But do not make the mistake of believing that because you have written what Lhankor Mhy did, you already know what it means to do it.

Air, Harmony, Movement

Several more seasons passed.

One morning, Hendrik sent the apprentices outside.

— Look for nothing.

— And what are we supposed to bring back? someone asked.

— What you find.

Tal climbed as high as he could.

His mind had been boiling for months. Up there, the wind reminded him of his clan. Far from the Grey Heron, his roots seemed almost more tangible than before.

He looked at the world in layers: the earth beneath him, the Air where he stood, the sky, Yelm, the stars, the Moon. Then he thought of what lay below, where Lhankor Mhy himself had walked.

He felt himself in the middle.

Small, but not crushed.

When he returned, Tal thought he could name three things moving through him.

Air, first: the middle, the interface, what exists between above and below.

Harmony: what could bind different, even contrary things without making them disappear.

Movement: the curiosity that could not let him stand still before a question.

Hendrik asked what Harmony was if opposites truly remained opposed.

Tal answered with the words that would remain his:

“Things are. Even when contrary, they are there, together.”

The three Runes were inscribed on his tablet: Air. Harmony. Movement.

What remains without the tablet

A few seasons later, Hendrik presented Tal for initiation into Lhankor Mhy.

At the entrance to the sanctuary, the Sages took away everything he had written.

Even the tablet bearing his three Runes.

— You do not take what you know with you. You are about to discover what remains when you can no longer consult it.

Tal entered.

Before him stood the signs of Truth and Law.

A Sage asked:

“What do you come here seeking?”

Tal answered that he sought the agreement and support of the first of the Sages, the grey-bearded god, the keeper of knowledge. If the god accepted him, Tal wished to devote his life to Law and Truth.

And his own doubt struck him.

Neither Law nor Truth appeared on his tablet.

Had he spent all this time becoming someone else? Was he in the wrong place?

The Sages did not answer for him.

They asked whether he had come to offer his life to Lhankor Mhy or to the Runes. They reminded him that a man did not need to be the Wind to worship Orlanth. And that a man who already possessed Truth might have little reason to come seeking it.

Then Tal understood.

What he had called Harmony had not been wrong. It was the name he had given his intuition of Law: what binds things without erasing their differences.

What he had called Movement had not been wrong either. He had finally recognized the direction of that movement: Truth, not as certainty acquired, but as what had always compelled him to continue the search.

Tal fell to his knees and wept.

For a moment he no longer knew whether he was in the sanctuary or elsewhere. He seemed to see a grey-bearded presence amid all that had been known, forgotten, and still remained to be sought.

And the first question returned:

“Tell me what's wrong.”

There was no tablet anymore.

There was the world.

When Tal came back to himself, the Sages traced Truth upon his forehead, then Law.

Hendrik stood behind them.

He said only:

“Now, seek.”

Session 0 ended where Talimar's road truly began.