ENLIGHTENMENT

Sunwane, third of Highsprigh

Settler’s Gain, at last! The jewel of Xintil, how brightly it gleams. So worth the journey, though I will miss Jarasper keenly, of course. I only wish he could have seen this place before he died. Still, I have to remember – he would have wanted us to enjoy the glory of life here. To make his sacrifice worthwhile.

Stars of Azyr, but this place is incredible. The food! The music! My soul feels like it’s singing whenever I turn a new corner. Tough to get a decent drink, but by no means impossible once you know the right people, and it’s always the good stuff. You have to come here, somehow, my dear. Just make sure you bring your best dress…

For a place that claims to be all about the inner self, they put a lot of stock in appearances.

Cometsday, last of Highspright

It’s so bright here, my love. Blindingly so, at times. No wonder there is such a fashion for elaborate headgear! It’s that or smoke-glass eyepieces if you want to see anything but glare when the skies are at full glow.

They say it was once a warming light, rather than an oppressive one; that an evolution of the realm itself saw the pitiless, cloudless sky became a lens – a lens that made Hysh’s light burn the skin of those it did not recognise. A form of exorcism, or so the Realm-lords would have it. A necessary measure, an adaptation, as a body adapts to fight an infection. The bootleggers I met in the Garden District aren’t convinced. They think it changed because of the time the aelves call the Spirefall. That the fires of their cataclysmic civil war burned out something in the air itself.

Ah, the blessed aelves. ‘So beautiful, so elegant. How lucky we settlers are to have them as our mentors.’ That’s how everyone talks about them. At least to their faces.

They’ve ordered this city to the last detail. It’s a work of art; you really should see it, if you can. Practically pristine in the inner districts. Sometimes the tutors look at you as if you’re dirtying up the place just by existing. You can’t even break wind here without feeling guilty about it, like you’re befouling their precious harmony. Flatulence as an act of Chaos! No doubt they just evaporate their own bodily waste in beams of light. Maybe they expel it from their mouths as hot air; they talk enough of it, after all.

Arcobalde Lazerne gets it. My core lecture today is with him, and I’m actually looking forward to this one. Old Balde’s a good teacher (‘for a human’, the aelves would add), and I have every faith he’ll get us through the Cometsday Assessment, but that’s not why I like him so much. He feels the same way we do about the Lumineth – although he’s not stupid enough to preach openly, we can read into his inflections just fine. That twinkle in his eye, all the while. I love it. What charisma.

It’s a game we play, he and I, trying to get the most entertaining subtext across without cracking a smile. If one of the aelven tutors raises an impeccable eyebrow at something we say, we just play dumb, and they move on, dismissive as they always are whenever we disappoint them. Maybe they know exactly what we’re up to, but they’re too prissy to call us on it in case it inflames things further.

On the other hand, maybe they really do think we’re little more than pets, a bunch of apes in white robes, playing at being intellectuals. That the Time of Chaos reduced us all to a barbarism that was never that far off in the first place. Well, Sigmar was one of us, was he not? Remind me, who sits on the throne of Azyr? Who brought civilisation itself back from the brink of disaster? Ha! With all these rhetorical questions I sound like one of your silvered knights, now. ‘Only the Faithful!’

Maybe you’d like me dressed in plate mail sometime. I could even drape some plagueweed over my legs if it would help.

Zenithus, last of Highspright

Weird, that lecture on Cometsday. Old Balde seemed uncharacteristically serious, and rather distracted. Kept looking up at the prisms. He was fine once he got into the meat of it, started detailing the twelve exorcisms and the variants practised in each of the Great Nations. Warmed to the subject, then, a little of his old smile in his words as he talked of banishing gheists and sending unquiet spirits back to Shyish. Something of a specialism of Balde’s, I gather. He said he’d show us the Beacon of Intellect in a courtyard lecture if we pass our mid-semesters. He’s well pleased with his Luminark, because he cracked a big smile then all right, white teeth dazzling in the wrinkled brown leather of his face. Still, he got serious again when a Lumineth walked past the amphitheatre gate.

Afterwards, a few of us stayed behind. Asked him what was wrong. Twelve Bolts, but did we feel a chill on us at the answer.

‘Do not come to the notice of the aelves, my students,’ he said. ‘That way you may one day know peace.’

He flew high in his time, that bald old coot. He may yet fly again. But to hear him say that… I have to say, my love, it was the most dispiriting thing. Maybe the naysayers are right. There’s something deeply wrong with this place if they constantly insist on you raising yourself up, only to dash you down if you rise too high. To force you to open your eyes, then blind you if you see too much.

Can’t they see how broken that is?

Voidsday, first of Azyr’s Gleaming

It’s getting worse out there. More rumblings of discontent, harsh words instead of harsh glances, especially when someone fails a test and is sent back to the Simple Districts. God-King above, even that term grates upon my nerves. They say it’s because the architecture is kept to certain minimalist principles, that simplicity is beautiful. But what – you’re telling me it’s a coincidence only humans live here? Simple Districts indeed. Pompous prigs.

Whilst we’re on the subject of nomenclature, the whole issue of the city’s formal title is getting out of hand. There’s no way the bloodlines of the founders are going to call it ‘Yllurai Xhen’, let alone sign off on it. Not this side of the grave anyway. Sure, it’s not some pioneer’s port any more. The city’s a wonder of the realms, its spires glittering white in the shimmerheat whilst the Enlightenment Prisms float in a stately dance around them like frozen crystal stars. Those things give me the creeps, too. Folk get taken up to them, sometimes. We’ve seen them ‘dock’ in the higher spires long enough for people to go in and others to come out. Tiny figures, heads hung, always accompanied by a pair of tall-helmed Lumineth.

We still outnumber them, what, six to one or something. Settler’s Gain is a city of men, not aelves. A city of pioneers that finally found something good in the ravages of a dark time. The Lumineth don’t get to take that away from us, even in the name of a better world.

The more they suffocate us with their ‘uplift’ and ‘inspiration’, the more we’ll fight for air. It’s going to stay called Settler’s Gain. That’s where we draw the line. We’re all agreed on it, even the old hands.

Especially the old hands.

Cometsday, first of Azyr’s Gleaming

Arcobalde didn’t show for his lecture today. Instead, we had Mistressine Llina-Illit Shai, a Syari with big ideas about the nature of identity in craftsmanship. I asked her where Arcobalde was, after class. She looked at me as if I was an insect. Told me he was enjoying his yearly recess, and that she was the locum covering his absence, something in her tone telling me not to press the matter.

I’ll press it if I have to, lightfoot. Balde didn’t mention anything about a recess last lecture.

Cometsday, second of Azyr’s Gleaming

Well, the old buzzard was back this week. Back in style, spotless new robes of office and a real spring in his step. The light was back in his eyes when he looked at us, but it was not the glimmer of a private joke, a shared secret. More like staring at a pair of lanterns, to be honest. Did not sit well with me.

For an hour and a half Arcobalde held forth at great length about the glory of the Xintilian Symbiosis. Told us all how necessary it was for the Calligraves to seal the land with their mile-long runes. I’ve heard him sing quite another song on the subject, and not so long ago. I asked him if it was worth it no matter whose homestead gets incinerated in the process – or whether the residents happen to be home at the time.

He calmly explained why he had been mistaken in the past to think that the collateral damage of such a thing was a prohibitive factor, that the deaths were sacrifices, martyrdoms to the greater cause of holding back the scourge of Chaos. He cited examples, even sketched out some lumin-diagrams in the air, all the while looking right at me with this beatific smile.

Martyrdoms mean a lot more when they are voluntary, don’t you think?

I got a scroll-summons slid into my lap in the next lecture, Mistressine Shai’s name-runes on the cryptoseal and Arcobalde’s alongside them.

Felt sick. I went home early.

Voidsday, third of Meadowswell

Many apologies for the lack of recent correspondence, but I have wonderful news to impart! All my doubts have been burned away by the light of true edification, my dove. All my questions have been answered to my satisfaction.

I was misguided, I humbly admit that now. Dissatisfaction is part of the human condition, after all, is it not? The province of the earthbound. Then one ascends to a higher plane of thought, as have I, and finds a measure of perspective.

I cannot thank dear Arcobalde enough for helping me ascend, and the sublime Mistressine Shai with him. With the grace of the Tutors, with their kind invite to stay within one of the wondrous chambers of the Enlightenment Prisms, I have seen the light.

The heavy weight of bitterness and suspicion has been put away, as a child puts away the trifles of youth the better to elevate himself. Yllurai Xhen is a city without flaws, a masterpiece of civil design and glorious theory made practice. It is a symbol, I see that now. An icon of the symbiosis between aelf and man. Though in truth it is a partnership far from equal; we are the lucky students, and they are our benevolent mentors.

In time, all the nations of Sigmar will come to realise this as the Cities of Light take shape across the realms. In time, the squalid old cities of men, built through haste on poor foundations, will crumble and fade away. It cannot come soon enough.

All that will be left is utopia.

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