A Finer Print
Twentieth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
In his youth Aemon Naremos had briefly considered becoming an advocate.
Very briefly indeed, for the intricacies of Volantine law, born not of any lawmaker's vision but the compromises of four centuries of common use, had repelled a mind that preferred the ordered lines of geography to the tangled weave of rhetoric. He had certainly gotten quite a bit of use out of the former, mapping the ley lines that crossed his new lands flowing like unseen torrents from the burning husk of Old Valyria. Yet now here he was, returned from the fringes of civilization to the bustling and ever-sprawling Sorcerer's Deep working to find loopholes in law, only this was not a trial of any mortal judge, nor those indicted mere men.
"I think a commonality of
ideal might be best here..." the soft golden light of the
azata lady fell upon the parchments laid out before them, in their dancing light the symbols derived from book and scroll, dream and memory, seeming to gain more of the life of that which they were meant to reflect, the Pact Primeval, by which all the works of hell were bound.
"If only they had one," Aemon sighed, reaching for his tea. Myrish Black, thick as tar and about as flavorful, Aeron called it, but the mage did not care. Every magister should have at least one uncommon taste, to make them stand apart from the crowd. Some might consider sorcery to be that eccentricity in his case, but Aemon suspected there would come a time when being an aristocrat without a drop of magic in your blood would be what is counted quaint, and he had every intention to live that long.
Gathering his thoughts, he tried to explain. "The first Fall may have been precipitated by an ideal, an overarching desire, my lady, but devils crafted since have been made as..." he paused a moment motioning for Gylseas, his false-wyrm assistant, to recover one of the notes princess Daenerys left on her rituals, "
tools," he finished, pointing to the relevant piece of the ritual. "An affirmation of identity and purpose will work for any one breed of baatezu, of course, as her ritual shows, but it is only by working with the foundation that binds them all that we can remove them all from Hell's sphere."
For a long moment the spirit of flame looked at him in silence, her face as impassive as a graven image upon the columns of the Temple of Meraxes. "You make a fair point, my lord, but I think also a mistake. One cannot use a portion of a chain as the instrument of freedom. If a commonality must exist between all baatezu who use this ritual, then it must be one of
experience rather than service."
"All devils serve," Aemon replied automatically, quoting the First Truth of the Pact Primeval.
"Certainly..." a smile, wistful and determined all at once, showed upon her features. "Yet that is not all that they do. Although the Lord of the Ninth may dream himself a demiurge to break and reforge the Spheres in his image, that that is nothing more than mad ambition. He does not rule the world of mortals, nor yet the spheres of the Elements. Even the barren soil of Heaven rejects his purpose, albeit to the call of darker
things." There was pain in her eyes, such that the fleeting span of mortal years could not hold, and a part of Aemon wished he could ask her to stop, but he knew that in sorcery wisdom oft grew in bitter soil, so he listened.
"He does not have utter domination even over his own subjects," Bloom continued. "Else how could Mammon have performed his great folly?"
"That's it," Excitedly Aemon grabbed his staff, struggling against the urge to smile fit to match the grin of the gilded fey skull set upon it. "We need to set up interviews, look for commonalities of experience that that can be tied back to Mammon's initial agreement. We shall undermine the Pact not as a chisel striking a mountain's face, but as a river working away at its roots unseen."
The Final Contravention Progress 23/30
OOC: I was initially going to do wider conversation regarding the differences in their current fiefs and how they manage it, but then the discussion on the nature of their actual project proved surprisingly engaging and relevant to character building so I just want with that. Not yet edited.
