As if reading her mind, the Shadowcloak interjects, "What does hold the attention of the Dementlieuse, Professor?"
“Sensation,” Kingsley replied, “In every meaning of the word. They want their senses aroused in every way, with as much flair as possible. It is good to be able to participate in novelty, but best to have pioneered it.” The Zherisian was too well-mannered and wary to voice her nationalistic prejudices.
While she had been speaking, she had been focusing her attention on her answer. Now that she had come to an end, her mind began to pick up on the cause of the growing unease she was feeling. She forced her gaze to drop away from the Shadowcloak’s face, and to focus on her hands, as if in thought. Bloody sun… she thought, slipping into a breathing exercise to prevent herself from shuddering or slipping into panic. Nonetheless, she couldn’t stop her mind from wondering whether the Father was capable of normal vision. She had first assumed the glistening effect to be due to the light flickering upon the dark spectacles. Her shoulders began to tense as she had an eerie image of him weeping, with onyx streams slipping down his face like ichor. It might be an illusion, she tried to convince herself, while trying to ignore the inner skeptic that wondered why anyone would choose such a repulsive façade.
She looked up as he began to speak, but kept her eyes fixed upon his glasses, willing herself not to look beyond them. “Every brother who enters our society is required to submit a thesis,” she began. “It is not enough to be intelligent; we are also called upon to be creative.
“New ideas by necessity challenge orthodoxy. Many of these ideas are of course useless; they are erroneous, or else repetitive of other explored options. But sometimes a new train of thought is uncovered, or an unidentified facet of a problem. And at such moments, we are called upon to challenge what we hold to be true, to see whether we have limited ourselves by our own assumptions or biases, conscious or not.
“Survival of the fittest. Not of the purest,” Gertrude remarked. “There is a reason why we speak demeaningly of the ‘inbred’. Any social group which severely restricts its ‘intercourses’, if you will, endangers itself. It predisposes itself to certain problems, and renders itself vulnerable to others. Prejudices and taboos are often the cause of the isolation of these social groups in the first place- racial, class-based, religious, ideological.” She restrained herself from making her criticisms of the Fraternity less ambiguous. The Countess would have either told the Umbra in detail what they’d discussed in February, or else had deemed it unwise to invoke his wrath.
Instead, she pretended to move back to the original topic. “Caille recognises that her sect is seen as academic and idealistic. Sadly, however ‘academic’ and ‘idealistic’ are synonymous with ‘impractical’ and ‘unrealistic’. She also knows that the temple’s success as a whole has been related to its popularity- or its accessibility, if you prefer, to the populace. She seeks a way to remain true to her sect’s principles and goals, while also encouraging public sympathy and support: religious, social and financial.
“She will never open the library to all, but she will pretend to consider the possibility. She will invite in representatives of other sects and faiths to illustrate her tolerance while depending on her sect’s vaunted brilliance to make fools of them. She will generously offer to educate devotees, who will produce anchorites to further her goals and to uncover the library’s secrets, and insights into the Grand Scheme. In short, she will stoop to appeal to the masses, because without them, the sect will either fade away as an insignificance, or be destroyed by their enemies’ supporters, and nobody else will care enough except to loot their ashes for anything worth retrieving.”
Gertrude looked into the dark lenses at her calm reflection. “In short, while we may bemoan having to interact in this world of illusions and lies, we cannot rise above it if we do not learn how to deal with it, and so master it.”
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