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- Character Biography
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(OOC: The thread is open to all College students and staff).
Vaezhasar had arrived early, as became a man who liked to stack the odds by the simple expedient of being the first piece on the board. He sat, not quite enthroned, but certainly accommodated, in a chair he would have described, in a moment of charity, as a geological event with armrests. Petrified wood made poor cushion and excellent argument; it insisted on the sitter’s attention the way a stern tutor insists on declensions in long dead languages. His armor didn't complain and indeed moved with great smoothness as he crossed one greaved leg over the other and regarded the lectern before him, where a book of respectable girth lay open: vellum gone the faint yellow of old ivory; binding stout enough to survive an overzealous apprentice or an underfunded library move. The helm, for once, did not occupy his features. Unmasked, he wore the expression of a man trying out the dangerous sport of serenity and half suspecting he would be better at sarcasm.
Behind him the board waited: a great, ivory-white rectangle fastened to the wall the way a proclamation is nailed to a city gate, meant to be read and not, under any circumstances, redecorated. Across it ran a legend in dark indigo, letters tall and prim as magistrates: Study of magical entities. The script was too crisp for human industry. Ink—even the good stuff brewed by those solemn fellows in the Alchemical Quarter—bleeds, feathers, yields to the grain. This line did not. It possessed the uncompromising edge of a rune cut by a patient hand with a better class of chisel. If it was handwriting, the hand had never been mortal and had a pedant’s sense of kerning.
The hall had the calm of a well-fed cat and the echo of a half-remembered hymn. Light from tall windows quartered the space into honest rectangles; dust motes paraded as if under inspection; everything smelled faintly of chalk, beeswax, and hypotheses. Elbion’s builders loved pale stone and clean lines, and the College had obliged them for centuries: old marble given a new polish each generation so that youth could admire antiquity without getting grit on their sleeves. The place sat at the city’s northern brow like a diadem, its tower the nearest thing Elbion had to a sundial for the whole district, and its lone gate, down the hill and around two turns, saw more anxious foot traffic on examination days than the counting houses saw on tax day. That was the College for you: an enclave with its own old laws, well-guarded doors, and an ingrained talent for reminding the city that genius requires a perimeter.
He allowed himself the small wicked pleasure of imagining the students’ arrival in taxonomical order, as befitted the hour’s subject. First would come the diurnal scholars, those punctual creatures who measured life in margins and found their courage in well-sharpened quills. Then the shy bipeds traveling in pairs, watchful as hares. After them the solitary predators of the back row, hooded, intelligent, and sullenly certain they were the most interesting entities in the room. Last, inevitably, the migratory flock who had been waylaid by breakfast, romance, or both. Vaezhasar’s mouth tilted. If the College had taught him anything, it was that classification is a convenience and exceptions are the only reliable rule.
He leaned back. The chair accepted exactly as much of him as stone accepts a chisel, and no more. On the lectern a ribbon marked the page where some former scholar, anonymous, meticulous, and now safely historical, had glossed a paragraph about familiars with a marginal note so neat it looked printed. He read it, snorted, and closed the matter with an economical, “No.” It would make a good opening: the courteous demolition of a respectable error. Students appreciated a cleanly disassembled fallacy; it suggested the universe possessed hinges.
Vaezhasar had arrived early, as became a man who liked to stack the odds by the simple expedient of being the first piece on the board. He sat, not quite enthroned, but certainly accommodated, in a chair he would have described, in a moment of charity, as a geological event with armrests. Petrified wood made poor cushion and excellent argument; it insisted on the sitter’s attention the way a stern tutor insists on declensions in long dead languages. His armor didn't complain and indeed moved with great smoothness as he crossed one greaved leg over the other and regarded the lectern before him, where a book of respectable girth lay open: vellum gone the faint yellow of old ivory; binding stout enough to survive an overzealous apprentice or an underfunded library move. The helm, for once, did not occupy his features. Unmasked, he wore the expression of a man trying out the dangerous sport of serenity and half suspecting he would be better at sarcasm.
Behind him the board waited: a great, ivory-white rectangle fastened to the wall the way a proclamation is nailed to a city gate, meant to be read and not, under any circumstances, redecorated. Across it ran a legend in dark indigo, letters tall and prim as magistrates: Study of magical entities. The script was too crisp for human industry. Ink—even the good stuff brewed by those solemn fellows in the Alchemical Quarter—bleeds, feathers, yields to the grain. This line did not. It possessed the uncompromising edge of a rune cut by a patient hand with a better class of chisel. If it was handwriting, the hand had never been mortal and had a pedant’s sense of kerning.
The hall had the calm of a well-fed cat and the echo of a half-remembered hymn. Light from tall windows quartered the space into honest rectangles; dust motes paraded as if under inspection; everything smelled faintly of chalk, beeswax, and hypotheses. Elbion’s builders loved pale stone and clean lines, and the College had obliged them for centuries: old marble given a new polish each generation so that youth could admire antiquity without getting grit on their sleeves. The place sat at the city’s northern brow like a diadem, its tower the nearest thing Elbion had to a sundial for the whole district, and its lone gate, down the hill and around two turns, saw more anxious foot traffic on examination days than the counting houses saw on tax day. That was the College for you: an enclave with its own old laws, well-guarded doors, and an ingrained talent for reminding the city that genius requires a perimeter.
He allowed himself the small wicked pleasure of imagining the students’ arrival in taxonomical order, as befitted the hour’s subject. First would come the diurnal scholars, those punctual creatures who measured life in margins and found their courage in well-sharpened quills. Then the shy bipeds traveling in pairs, watchful as hares. After them the solitary predators of the back row, hooded, intelligent, and sullenly certain they were the most interesting entities in the room. Last, inevitably, the migratory flock who had been waylaid by breakfast, romance, or both. Vaezhasar’s mouth tilted. If the College had taught him anything, it was that classification is a convenience and exceptions are the only reliable rule.
He leaned back. The chair accepted exactly as much of him as stone accepts a chisel, and no more. On the lectern a ribbon marked the page where some former scholar, anonymous, meticulous, and now safely historical, had glossed a paragraph about familiars with a marginal note so neat it looked printed. He read it, snorted, and closed the matter with an economical, “No.” It would make a good opening: the courteous demolition of a respectable error. Students appreciated a cleanly disassembled fallacy; it suggested the universe possessed hinges.
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