Living Portrait

This Portrait represents Talimar exactly at the end of Session 3. It carries forward what was established in Session 2 and adds only what explicitly entered 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.

At Jonstown, this attraction to the space between things takes on a more concrete form: when an archival dispute stifles him, Tal almost physically rediscovers his desire for the road, the horizon, and the world beyond the walls.

Law — what binds

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

At Jonstown, this understanding has already met a 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.

The dispute over Jorstan's legacy adds a more prosaic experience: archives, titles, copies, and oaths are also forms of memory that bind people together. Tal can recognize their importance without discovering that he enjoys dealing with them.

Truth — what sets him in motion

Truth remains what compels Tal to seek.

His first investigation taught him to distinguish seeking Truth from claiming to possess it. Session 3 adds another movement: when the question placed before him no longer interests him, Tal does not stop seeking. He simply turns his gaze elsewhere — toward the roads, news from the world, and then Sartar himself.

Young Grey Sage

Tal continues 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;
• knows how to search catalogues, registers, and a Sage's working papers to recover provenance;
• tablet of the seven differences, kept since meeting Hendrik;
• ancestral knife given by his father.

Jonstown has shown him that a Grey Sage can be called out of the Library because a community needs someone to gather testimony, examine facts, recall the limits of what Law allows people to state, and find a formulation on which others can then act.

Session 3 adds a tension that is not yet a conclusion: Tal loves knowledge, but he is not certain he loves every kind of work that knowledge demands.

The conflict around Jorstan reminds him of his travels with Grimar: he loved travelling with his uncle, but not the merchandise. At Jonstown, he loves seeking, reading, and understanding, but discovers a deep impatience with certain local matters of property and procedure.

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.

Session 3 directly revives the memory of those journeys. Tal remembers that he loved the roads more than commerce itself. Listening to Daran, a merchant from Alda-Chur, speak of Tarsh, Furthest, inspections, and soldiers, he recovers the feeling that a much larger world is still moving beyond Jonstown.

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 gained lived precision: when something is not established, the Sage must also know how to say that he does not know.

Session 3 especially puts the fourth and fifth gestures into play. Tal does not settle for what the Library places before him: after finding the answer concerning Argrathor's documents, he keeps searching for something else — Sartar, the Red Moon, the Royal Roads, what may still remain of the founder's work.

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 took part in his first investigation as a young Grey Sage. Beren died during a cattle raid; Karest was badly wounded; the testimony and the body reduced uncertainty without establishing whether Beren had stopped fighting when the mortal blow was struck.

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

He wrote into his Portrait:

“Seek and report only established facts.”

Hendrik added 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 performed a small ritual of vigilance addressed to Lhankor Mhy. He overheard a spontaneous statement from Karest — “He still had the knife” — without turning it into automatic proof.

The next day, the affair ended without complete truth: the Greenhaft acknowledged a debt for the death that occurred during their raid; the Blueberry did not demand that Karest be declared a murderer on the basis of a surrender that could not be established.

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

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

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

Jonstown — Argrathor's papers

In Jorstan's registers, Tal found the notes that clarified the status of the disputed bundle:

“Argrathor's papers — from the household. To copy.”

“originals to be returned after copying”

He also read this sentence by Jorstan about his father:

“My father could not write. That did not stop him from preserving things we would have lost without him.”

Tal recognizes the value of that memory, but the affair did not give him the feeling that he had found what he is looking for in the world.

Sartar — a sign in the margin

While studying the life of Sartar, Tal connected the founding of the kingdom, the Royal Roads, the fall of Tarsh under Lunar domination, and the persistence of traditions according to which some still secretly honor the founder.

In the margin of a text discussing those who still maintain his strength, Tal noticed the Rune of Sartar, drawn by another hand.

He memorizes the sign and writes it into his Portrait.

The Rune gives him neither order nor destination. Yet it is enough to open a new curiosity: who still honors Sartar in secret, and what remains of his living work?

Tal also thinks of Boldhome, the great city of the kingdom. He hopes to see it one day. That desire is his own: no text sends him there.