Living Portrait

This Portrait represents Talimar exactly at the end of Session 2. It carries forward what was established in Session 1 and adds what explicitly entered his Portrait during this session.

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

“The ears hear, the eyes see, the head understands, Lhankor Mhy knows.”

Talimar, called Tal — man, 20 — Sartarite of the Grey Heron clan, young initiate of Lhankor Mhy.

Runes

Air — the middle

Tal recognizes himself in the space between things: earth and sky, high and low, clouds, wind, Moon and stars. Far from the clan, Air also remains the tangible reminder of his roots.

Law — what binds

Tal understands Law as what connects things without erasing their differences.

At Jonstown, this understanding meets a new limit: Law does not ask the Sage to make the world neater than it is. A Situation can remain uncertain without ceasing to belong to an order that must be looked at honestly.

Truth — what sets him in motion

Truth remains what compels Tal to seek.

His first investigation as a Grey Sage teaches him to distinguish more rigorously between seeking Truth and claiming to possess it. The end of the affair adds another difficulty: accurately reporting a testimony is not the same thing as deciding its value oneself.

Young Grey Sage

Tal begins to put into practice what he learned from Hendrik, son of Enderos.

• insatiable curiosity;
• distinguishes what he knows from what he thinks he knows;
• can sustain several hypotheses without prematurely turning one into a truth;
• learns to formulate precisely what is established and what is not;
• tablet of the seven differences, kept since meeting Hendrik;
• ancestral knife given by his father.

Jonstown also transforms what this Life Chapter means to him. Tal had mainly encountered Lhankor Mhy through myths, texts, questions, and the search for knowledge. His first investigation shows him a Grey Sage called out of the Library because a community needs someone to gather testimony, examine facts, recall what Law allows people to state, and find a formulation on which others can then act.

Knowledge is therefore not only what the Sage preserves or discovers. It carries a responsibility toward those who will have to live with what he says.

Grey Heron and the roads of Tarsh

Tal is the son of Calimar and Urestona, carls of the Grey Heron clan, of the Colymar tribe.

His uncle Grimar, a merchant, took him to Tarsh when he was young. Tal discovered a Lunar civilization there that he admires in some respects and rejects in others. This contradiction remains one of the deep tensions that set him in motion.

Among the people and belonging that matter:

• Calimar and Urestona, his parents;
• Grimar, his merchant uncle;
• Hendrik, his teacher;
• the Grey Heron clan;
• the clan's old traditionalist Grey Sage.

Myth of Lhankor Mhy — the quest for knowledge

Tal retained five gestures from the myth taught by Hendrik:

• distinguish what is true;
• remember what has been learned;
• preserve knowledge through writing;
• seek what is missing;
• continue searching even when one already knows.

His initiation connected him to Lhankor Mhy. At Jonstown, the first of these gestures gains lived precision: when something is not established, the Sage must also know how to say that he does not know.

Traces

Initiation

Tal now understands what he had first called Harmony as an intuition of Law, and what he had called Movement as the drive of his quest for Truth.

The question “Tell me what's wrong” remains attached to his experience of Lhankor Mhy and to his way of looking at the world.

Jonstown — saying exactly what we know

At the House of Peace, Tal takes part in his first investigation as a young Grey Sage. Beren died during a cattle raid; Karest is badly wounded; the testimony and the body reduce uncertainty without establishing whether Beren had stopped fighting when the mortal blow was struck.

Tal discovers that Truth does not require omniscience. It also requires not attributing to the world more certainty than it gives.

He writes into his Portrait:

“Seek and report only established facts.”

Hendrik adds a clarification that now matters just as much: when the facts are not established, one must also know how to report “we do not know.”

Jonstown — what people do with an incomplete truth

The night before Karest's interview, Tal cannot let go of the affair. He goes out alone and, before prowling around the House of Peace, performs a small ritual of vigilance addressed to Lhankor Mhy. He overhears a spontaneous statement from Karest — “He still had the knife” — without turning it into automatic proof.

The next day, Karest repeats the same claim in his formal testimony. Tal now has two matching testimonies concerning Beren's knife and his movement, but the uncertainty around “Enough” remains.

When he finally hands the investigation over to the clan representatives, Tal discovers another boundary. He can report what Darin claimed, state the conditions in which he heard it, and say what the investigation does or does not allow anyone to conclude. But minimizing the value of the testimony himself already crosses into a step that belongs to the judgment of those who must act.

The assembly corrects this distinction, then continues without obtaining complete truth: the Greenhaft acknowledge a debt for the death that occurred during their raid; the Blueberry do not demand that Karest be declared a murderer on the basis of a surrender that could not be established.

Tal is left with a new curiosity: what do people do when they are given an incomplete truth?

And his small nocturnal ritual leaves behind a phrase that now belongs to him:

“The ears hear, the eyes see, the head understands, Lhankor Mhy knows.”