Chapter 1
Part 1
Hearing the sound of the coach's bell, my sleepiness vanished.
Rubbing my eyes and giving a word of thanks to the coachman, Trimmau and I descended the steps onto the street.
Though the culture of horse-drawn coaches was still somehow persevering in my dearest England, a coach with four horses at the lead was rare enough that even the royal family probably didn't see it very often. The fact that the Trambelio faction had bothered to send me home with such a method of transportation was as clear as any threat could be. 'You understand how vast the gulf between us is now, right?'
That aside, having returned to my own town and applying my usual eye medicine, I stretched vigorously.
The City of
- Slur was a street that clearly showed its cobbled-together nature.
On the west side, a cityscape displaying the area's rich history was laid out, but on the east side which was closer to London more modern looking buildings peaked through. Rather than looking like the area lacked a coherent theme, it was more like a bandage hastily applied to cover a wound.
"Well, to put it bluntly, they just don't have any money," I spoke to myself.
As I recalled, when the Faculty of Modern Magecraft bought up the area, they simply decided not to bother fixing it up. Even so saying, the environment around a magus made a big difference in their work, so if possible it would have been best to remodel the whole area back to its more archaic look. But in the end, they just didn't have that kind of money.
Before that, they were in debt before they even spent the money to buy the area in the first place.
I certainly wouldn't say everything, but at least seventy percent of the world is decided by budget. That fact is no different in the world of magecraft. As sad as it is, the concept of the value of the world being calculated into a number and dollar value was approaching the realm of Mystery itself, so it wasn't something that could really be fought. The constantly continuing process of inflation all over the world was in itself an illusion produced by the collective unconscious of mankind.
Actually, magecraft that tied into currency directly has similar demands wherever it developed in the world, but that's enough thinking like my brother for now.
"Alright then. First..." Muttering to myself, I began walking.
Turning around an ivy-covered brick wall, I continued straight ahead up the hill and through a crossroad. Without delay, the structure I was heading towards came into view.
Of the twelve Faculties in the Clock Tower, it was the smallest main building of all the buildings designated for classes.
The surroundings were all nominally associated facilities of some university. The first Faculty - the main buliding of the Faculty of
General Fundamentals
Mystile
actually masqueraded as a real university itself, but our Faculty of Modern Magecraft was not large enough for that to be feasible.
As soon as I stepped into the entrance hall, the chilly air of the building welcomed me.
If nowhere else in the faculty, with most of the loan from Norwich being focused here, at least this place held a serene calm and grace.
And within ten seconds, that grace was shattered.
With a holler, a person came sliding down the banister of the spiral staircase in the hall. Short, blonde hair and blue eyes. Though he had a jovial expression on his face, the minute he saw me stepping on to that same staircase his expression changed rapidly.
"Ah! U-um, hi, Reines!"
Trying futilely to stop himself, he continued to accelerate down the handrail.
Sliding to the bottom like on a roller coaster, the blonde-haired youth cried out in pain.
"S-S-Sorry! I'm Sorry!!!"
"...Trim."
As I muttered, the mercury-coloured maid - no, not just coloured, she was mercury through and through - stepped out from behind me.
Her full name was Trimmau. Once the Archibald family's
Mystic Code - Moon Spirit's Spinal Fluid
Volumen Hydrargyrum
, I added a pseudo-personality and some functional limitations to it. In short, I had essentially made it into something like an autonomous golem. Currently, I was using her as a bodyguard and a servant for everyday tasks.
Raising a hand, she easily brought the still-sliding boy to a halt.
"Are you harmed, master?"
"Nah, I'm fine. Thanks."
Hearing Trimmau's question, I nodded slightly.
The impact of him running into her hand had seemed a little too light, but I did notice that a moment before he made contact he uttered a One Count spell "
"
It was probably some sort of magecraft used to alter his own inertia. It seemed to have worked in conjunction with an amulet he was wearing, but the fact he was able to do that while sliding at that speed was impressive. Magecraft was normally something that took extreme levels of concentration to perform, so even most high-ranking magi would probably not have the confidence to perform a stunt like that. Looking in the eyes of the one called the "Genius Idiot," I smiled.
"You wouldn't happen to have an excuse, would you?"
"Well, if we're going to have a spiral staircase like this, it would be rude to not slide down it! It was waiting here for me, with its handrail polished up and everything, so sliding down it like that was just good manners!"
"...that's the 37th time you've used that excuse, Flat," another reproachful voice called out from the top of the staircase.
The boy put his cheek close to the railing Flat had just slid down. With his nose beside the railing, he sniffed.
"It's as unreasonably shiny and slippery as ever. I thought I had made it out of the classroom first this time, but apparently no such luck."
Matching Flat's age, the boy at the top of the staircase was about fifteen. His softly curled blonde hair looked almost like a designer candy as it glowed in the soft afternoon sunlight. His exasperated eyes were somewhere between green and ultramarine, and he had a sense of slender, refined balance that spread from his fingertips up his shoulders. And to top it all off, his figure was nothing short of miraculous, putting even sculptures of ancient Greece to shame.
That beautiful young man spoke out with obvious irritation.
"What did you do to make Mr. El-Melloi so mad that he tripled our homework?"
"Why would you say that? Adding more homework is just his way of encouraging us! I mean, even you looked happy when he gave us another report to do, didn't you, Le Chien?"
"Don't call people dogs! My name is Svin! Svin Glascheit! How many years will it take to get that into your skull!" As the corners of his eyes tightened, he pointed a finger at him. From that extended finger, something fired off that sent shivers down my spine.
Gandr, a curse originating in Northern Europe. With just the point of a finger, it could strike one's target with illness, but this Gandr had a beastlike ferocity behind it, an obvious bloodlust. That bloodlust alone seemed like it would be sufficient as a curse. If you thought about it like the Oriental practice of Poisoning, you'd be on the right track.
Oh, just to make sure we're all on the same page, that bloodlust wasn't magecraft.
It was just his nature.
"But Le Chien is Le Chien! It's the same thing as Professor Charisma, or Master V, or Great Big Ben London's Star, or Magica Disclosure!"
Despite having taken the shot head on, Flat's casual response wasn't even out of carelessness. The incomplete curse deflected harmlessly off him, unable to overcome the latent resistance offered by the absurdly powerful Magic Circuits he was born with.
"...all of those examples are Mr. El-Melloi though! And the only one who called him Great Big Ben London Star is you!"
"Professor Charisma is you!"
Svin groaned at Flat's protest.
As much as I'd like to call him Le Chien too, I suppose it would best to call him by his actual name. It might get annoying after awhile.
Suddenly, Flat's breath caught.
"Wait...are you telling me that the in environment where you were brought up...the concept of 'Nicknames' didn't exist?!"
"Of course it did!"
Svin's shout of anger, a roar filled with Magic Energy, struck the floor below.
A moment before Svin's roar, which was powerful enough it had a physical force to it, I shook my head and took Trimmau's hand.
"Adjust."
Gently, a blew air out my mouth.
To describe it simply, Trimmau's mercury body became a mist and dissipated, spreading out across the room. A thin, grey veil absorbed Svin's shout, broke it down at the molecular level, and dispersed it harmlessly.
Seeing that, it seemed like Svin finally noticed my presence.
"Oh...uhh...Lady Reines..."
As his beautiful eyes went wide, he bowed his head so deeply it seemed like he might offer me his life as an apology.
"My apologies! I had no intention of so rudely making someone like yourself do such a thing!"
"Don't worry about it. It was an interesting thing to see," I gave him my honest opinion.
If an outsider had seen a scene like this one, no doubt they would get the impression magecraft was all about fun and games. When I thought of how much my brother must be suffering from having to deal with things like this every day, it suddenly made me feel a lot better.
Svin and Flat.
These two were the shining jewels of the El-Melloi classroom. No, if you at least restricted it to within their age range, they would still rightfully belong in the top ranks of the entire Clock Tower.
Indeed, that was why they were in the El-Melloi classroom in the first place - though Flat was actually cycled through a fair number of classrooms in the Clock Tower before my brother ended up with him.
"You two wouldn't happen to know where Gray and my brother are, would you?"
"Do you need my...er, do you need Gray for something?"
I decided to be kind and overlook the falter in his speech for now. After engaging in some rather stalker-like activity, he had been given strict orders not to come within a few meters of a certain girl. As hard as it might be to imagine, he was quite despondent over the whole affair.
As far as I was concerned, being that much of a pervert was perfectly fine.
After giving a loud sniff, Svin spoke.
"It doesn't smell like they've left the building, so I suspect they are in his private room."
"Thank you." Saying my thanks, I poked Flat's forehead.
"Reines?"
"I don't mind you being so familiar with me, but try to calm down a little. You're the oldest in your class, aren't you?"
"...actually, Lady Reines, I'm one month older than he is." Seeing his discontent, I couldn't help but laugh at Svin as he spoke.
"Well then, even more reason. You two are almost the same age, so try and keep it together."
Finishing my piece, I ascended the spiral staircase.
Now, the New Age students were just coming out of their classrooms. Of the twelve departments in the Clock Tower, the others did very little as far as attempting to attract new students, so most of them ended up coming to the Faculty of Modern Magecraft. I had yet to decide whether that was a good or a bad thing.
Regardless, I watched them out of the corner of my eye as I walked along the marble floor.
Eventually, a small noise reached my ears. The sound of someone humming. A very quiet, reserved humming.
Opening the door of one of the deeper rooms, the faint scent of oil wafted out into the hallway.
My brother's room was divided in two. Beside the entrance was a shelf for placing one's shoes. Of course, it was normal to wear shoes in the building, and it wasn't like there was an expectation for you to take off your shoes here. Maybe it was just a weird obsession of his, but he had numerous spare sets of clothes and pairs of shoes within his private room. Also at the entrance was a small little stool, upon which sat what looked like a little grey fairy.
The girl wearing a grey hood was holding a small cloth, using it to clean shoes. With various bottles of shoe cream and stain remover, and an assortment of small cloths to use them with, she was happily working away at polishing each of the shoes. Paying no mind to how dirty her fingers were getting, she was dutifully cleaning them right down to the laces.
"Polishing shoes again?"
"Ah, Miss Reines!" With a start, the hooded girl turned to me.
In all honesty, this was exactly the kind of situation I liked to tease people in, but for some reason with this girl I didn't feel up to it. Maybe because my favourite target was just a little further in. I normally wouldn't be one to pass up an hors d'oeuvre, but I guess I had had my fill with Flat and Svin earlier.
Seeing three neatly polished shoes lined up nicely, I spoke again.
"You enjoy polishing shoes quite a bit, don't you? I never thought polishing shoes could be all that fun. Let me give it a shot sometime."
"...it's just my job."
As reserved as always, the girl - Gray pushed the dirty cloths and bottles of shoe cream into hiding.
"It's not like I'm planning on taking it away from you." Her response had been so adorable, I found myself smiling despite myself.
This, too, was fairly rare for me. Maybe it was because, as closely tied as she was to magecraft, she wasn't a magus. When you didn't have to worry about politics and diplomacy with the person you were talking to, there was no need to constantly armour yourself. Though in reality I had grown so used to my armour that from an early age I had stopped distinguishing between that and my own skin.
"It just looked like you were having so much fun, it made me want to try it with you some time."
"...it looked fun?" Her grey eyes wavered as if she had heard a strange new word.
It was like this girl came from a completely monochrome world. Her skin, her hair, her eyes, even her clothes were all clearly divided up in whites and blacks. She was like a fairy of winter, from a world without colour. In a world blanketed in white snow, she alone was mournfully grey.
"Was that song earlier from your old home?"
"...umm..." Staring at the shoe she was currently working on, she thought for a bit before answering.
"...maybe it was."
"You don't remember?"
"I heard it first in my village, but I haven't heard all that much in the way of music anyways. It's possible that it came from my home, but I couldn't tell you if that's where it started."
"I see."
Now that I thought about it, I never did ask my brother about the time he went to pick her up.
Well, it was an unwritten rule among magi to never ask about another's past anyways. No matter how much you dug, all you'd find is pain.
With the conversation falling into a lull, Gray returned her gaze to the shoe in front of her. After a long while, without stopping her hands gently working away at the shoe, she spoke again.
"...do you have any memories of your home, Miss Reines?"
"Who, me?" Having been so engrossed in watching her work, the sudden question caught me by surprise. "Well, even besides the situation with the El-Melloi family, I was brought up in the Archisorte family tradition. It's the same story as any magus, really. Actually, I did live fairly close to the Clock Tower, so I guess there would be more examples of underhanded dealings in my story? The past ten years has been an awful lot of tight-rope walking, that's for sure. And in the Clock Tower, being young just makes you look like a convenient pawn. But looking back on it now, I feel like it was a fairly pleasant experience."
Though the majority of that came from paying people back once the authority of the El-Melloi faction was given to me.
As if steeling herself, Gray spoke again.
"...is that why my master became Lord El-Melloi II?"
Oh?
To think a girl who had only come here a month or two ago would ask a question as bold as that.
Though in reality, as if the question had embarrassed herself, she began to retreat further and further back into her hood, slowly dropping her head as she did so.
"Curious?"
"...maybe."
As if troubled, Gray went back to working on the shoe.
The shoe, which had a thin layer of cream on it, was now subjected to the brush. The soft horse hair brushed over the black leather again and again, like the job would only be finished when you could see a person's reflection in it. Once Gray's face was actually visible, she spoke again.
"...because he doesn't seem like he really wants to be a Lord at all."
How astute.
Indeed, if he had had even the slightest glimmer of interest in the position, there was no way I would have picked him. He was truly a magus among magi, with no interest in anything but magecraft and whatever lay beyond it. The whole purpose of the power struggles in the Clock Tower were to secure a good environment to perform experimentation with magecraft, but I wonder how many magi today remembered that?
"I do have a couple chains on him, after all."
As I spoke, I accidently let a mischievous smile slip out.
And here I had decided not to tease the poor girl. Look what happens when I let down my guard.
"...do you have another request of my master?" Gray asked, as direct as ever.
Her personality, always acting like she was afraid of people yet always reaching out eagerly towards them, always made me lose my focus a little.
"You really are a good student, aren't you?"
With a thump, I put my hand on her head. What sounded like a small groan came out from deep within the girl's hood, but she didn't recoil. That's it, be a good girl and just let me pet you a bit.
"Speaking of which, you always have that hood on inside too, don't you? Is that not too hot for you? If my brother is causing you problems, I don't mind lecturing him for you."
"...actually..."
As if the suggestion troubled her, she pulled her hood on tighter.
"...its because he said it was okay for me to keep my face hidden."
"Is that so."
Once again, she replied with a logic I couldn't quite follow.
Regardless, unlike my brother, I didn't have the bad habit of mindlessly pursuing everything I didn't understand. If I didn't understand, it was best to just let it lie. Life is short. There is too much to do. The fact that there was an eternal mountain of abandoned homework left over was just a fact of life.
Anyways, this time I decided to move on to my actual goal first.
"My brother is inside?"
"Yes." She nodded, pointing furtively into the room.
"Very well. Goodbye for now."
Leaving Gray a final wink, I reached out a hand to open the ornate inner door.
As it opened, a well-organized room opened up before me.
At first glance, it looked like a single, unbroken wall of books.
Painstakingly arranged according to their genre and size, the books were arrayed in such a manner that there was no risk of damage from sunlight coming through the nearby window. The sliding shelf seemed like it could easily hold a good two thousand books, but naturally this was only a small fraction of the entire collection.
On his desk a fountain pen made of pure silver, along with a guillotine-like cigar cutter gave the desk a fashionable feel. If one were to look at just that, you might get the impression that this room belonged to an actually capable person. ...well, the presence of the latest portable video game console lying in the corner did give an undeniably uncomfortable feeling, what with being inside one of the Clock Tower's academic facilities.
"With the way your apartment is, how is it that your room in the Clock Tower always looks like this? Are you hiding a cat or something?"
"...isn't it perfectly normal to keep one's place of work neat and tidy?"
Neither of us bothered with greetings. Apparently my brother was in the middle of reading a book of some sort. Sitting on an antique chair on the other side of the room, he was staring at the pages with a gloomy expression. Rather than some ancient volume passed gratefully into the hands of the professors of the Clock Tower, it appeared to be a relatively new publication.
After confirming Trimmau had closed the door behind us, I took a look at the book he was reading.
"That's a new book, isn't it?"
"It's on a topic from the California Convention, discussing a theory about Nuclear Energy as it interacts with the five elements. Its scope is pretty narrow, but only a few dozen were printed, so I ordered a copy in. Well, I suppose they have started selling digital copies of these kinds of things recently too."
As if it was a nuisance, my brother explained the book. Certainly the field of Modern Magecraft was centered around California and the west coast of the United States. Every year they released a publication focused on Modern Magecraft Theory under-girded by modern science. Nowadays, the connection between that Modern Magecraft and actual magecraft was very weak - in short, it revolved primarily around the Occult and related studies, so the number of people who cared enough to read about it at the Clock Tower was vanishingly small.
Long black hair, and a faint crease between his eyebrows.
Though his perpetually pessimistic nature gave him the air of someone slightly older, he still bore unmistakable features pointing towards his youth.
Lord El-Melloi II.
Just recalling that name made me want to laugh.
The name I had given him. The position I had sealed.
"...so, what is it this time? Another complaint?" Without lifting his gaze from his book, he bluntly threw out the question.
Ah yes. It wasn't that he was too busy to look up from his work, but he just didn't want to meet my gaze. Just thinking about how much he disliked me sent shivers of pleasure up my spine.
"The case with Adra was quite the trouble, wasn't it?"
My brother's face frowned about as hard as it probably could.
I could almost hear the sound of his teeth begin to grind. He was going to need some false teeth soon if he kept it up like that, but that would be fun too, in its own way.
"...it was well beyond the point of calling it 'trouble.'"
"My, how rude of me. Well, even so, you knew we had our own circumstances here to worry about." Rolling my shoulders, I began to run my hands along the back of a nearby chair.
Of course, our main goal had been to get the inheritance that had been left there, if at all possible. The chance to use the inheritance to repair the El-Melloi family Crest was difficult to pass up, but the price was as steep as could be expected. And in the end, whatever inheritance was left ended up being confiscated by the Faculty of Law anyways.
"I heard you met Luviagelita Edelfelt there? And that you are going to be her private tutor, much like you are mine."
"She already submitted her applications for her preferred three Faculties..." My brother spoke, using one hand to hold his book while the other massaged his temple.
Normally, a student at the Clock Tower would spend four years in
Mystile
the Faculty of General Fundamentals
, and after that move into one of the other departments. However, it was also fairly normal for particularly talented students to take on multiple course loads, or switch faculties repeatedly as soon as possible. On top of that, my brother regularly gave lectures as somewhat of a guest for other departments, so his influence was by no means limited to the El-Melloi classroom or the Faculty of Modern Magecraft.
"My, my. As expected of the Edelfelts. So, what are you going to do?"
"She practices Jewel Magecraft, so I'll just have the Faculty of Mineralogy deal with the annoying parts. I think I'll write a letter of recommendation for her as well. Whether she cares enough to take it or not is a different matter, of course."
"That again, huh?"
I didn't know whether to be impressed or disappointed.
He was always helping out in some way or other. It always just caused him more suffering, but at the last minute he'd always put up for someone else. I had to wonder how much he understood what he was doing.
And to top it off,
"...but you didn't come here to gossip, did you?" my brother so kindly changed the subject for me. "Hurry up and spit it out. If you went far enough out of your way to come see me here, then whatever you want must be even more troublesome for me, right?"
"Oh, don't worry, it's easy this time," I said with a bitter smile.
Putting both my elbows on his desk, I shuffled closer to him. Ignoring the distrustful expression he was making, I expressed my most vital of requests.
"Can I borrow Gray for a few days?"
Maybe because the request was so far beyond his expectations, he took a few seconds to respond. After narrowing his eyes even further, he finally slapped his book shut and turned to face me properly.
"Why Gray?"
"Oh, you're actually willing to look at me now? Is your student so precious to you?"
"...Reines."
Mixed in with my brother's voice was something terribly serious. Well, that's the kind of person he was. Completely indifferent to anything that bothered him, but deathly serious whenever it came to one of his students.
"Even above and beyond our contract, I have no problems with helping you out when you ask me. But that doesn't extend to my students. If you have fallen under the impression that the students of the El-Melloi classroom are somehow under your authority, then I regret to inform you that you are terribly mistaken."
Oh dear.
I guess student's like that would make a teacher like this. Or is it the other way around? Either way, it was time I stopped fooling around with him. Dropping my shoulders, I got to the truth behind my request.
"The truth is, I've received an invitation to a social gathering."
"...a social gathering?"
"Yes, an invitation from the Trambelio faction. Normally I would decline out of hand, but after they helped us negotiate with Lord Norwich for that loan, I can't just ignore it, can I?"
"...the Trambelio faction?" I could practically feel the temperature drop as my brother's gaze changed.
...yes.
It felt like he had come back. This frigid feeling of tension. Not the unprecedented lightness of someone like Flat, but more like the true world of magecraft that I knew. Like Gray had asked about earlier, it was a world that you couldn't understand until you sipped from the shadows of London itself.
This was my home. This is the place I was brought up.
My brother spoke up in a quiet voice.
"What's the purpose of the gathering?"
"Before answering that, can I ask a question of you first, as my tutor?"
Without waiting for his reply, I immediately continued.
"I ask you, my teacher. What, pray tell, is beauty?"
Though there was no way he could interpret what I had said as anything other than randomly changing the subject, his face nevertheless took on a serious expression. Taking a deep breath, he reached his hand out towards his desk.
"If you're talking about beauty as it pertains to magecraft, then a simple example would be the golden ratio, I suppose."
As he spoke, he pulled out a set square and a compass and placed them on the top of the desk. Pulling some notepaper towards him, he used the set square to draw a square with practiced precision, and then used the compass to draw a circle over one side of it.
In fact, the skills required to do this kind of drawing were indispensable in the field of drawing Magic Circles, so powerful magi often aimed at skills that would make them excellent surveyors. The theory that old magi had been involved in the beginning of Freemasonry were not far off the mark.
Extending the length of the sides of the square, using the points at which it intersected with the circle, he created a rectangle.
"This is the golden ratio. A binomial ratio that works alongside the Fibonacci Sequence - in short, a rectangle where if the short side is measured as one, the long side is measured as 1.618. Without regard to region or era, it's a ratio that humans have always found to bring out beauty. It was discovered and put to use by the architect Phidias in his work in Ancient Greece, and even two thousand years prior to him it was used in the construction of the pyramids by the Egyptian high priest Imhotep.
"Of course, there are many examples that show a harmonic beauty outside of the golden ratio. The wings of a dragon fly, the combs of a honeybee, the shell of the nautilus or a simple tornado, and even the distribution of stars in the Milky Way show a similarly spiralling structure. I think it's obvious at this point, but stabilizing things like magic circles and Workshops without paying attention to these harmonics beyond mere numbers is impossible. 'Beauty, thy name is math,' or something like that."
My brother explained methodically.
In an instant, his tone had changed to that of the lecturer within. No doubt it was his true life's calling. Would it really kill him to be a bit more grateful towards me, who gave him the opportunity to fulfill it?
"Aha, I think I remember Phidias. He was the one who introduced the symbol Φ to mathematics, correct?"
"That's a pretty incomplete way of remembering him. That Φ represents the golden ratio itself, after all. It's also used in Euler's totient function and wave motion functions."
My brother gave a boring-sounding reply.
"He was also the architect that oversaw the construction of the Parthenon. He's the one who created the statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. This is why one mistake can make you qualified to be a Heroic Spirit."
Using all of my strength, I ignored the last words my brother had muttered.
Well, that's why I couldn't help but have a lingering affection for him.
After a moment of silence, my brother pulled a cigar out from his chest pocket. Using his cigar cutter to cut off the tip, he struck a match and lit the end.
"...but of course, unlike these, there are also those things that are only beautiful in a given time and place. In other words, fashion."
Saying so, he pulled heavily on his cigar. Perhaps he had taken my tastes into account, but the cigar gave off a relatively faint odour.
"This 'fashion' doesn't just apply to clothes and music. It really applies to the vast majority of human culture."
"Oh? Isn't applying it that widely a bit over the top?"
"It's the truth," he replied with another puff on his cigar. "Things like 'the greatest piece of literature' or 'the greatest discovery' are a dime a dozen. That 'fashion' would be what we call the collective unconscious in Modern Magecraft - and though the terminology doesn't fit perfectly, you could also think of it like the alaya-vijnana in Eastern thought. Regardless, it's something that is fundamentally restricted to a particular time period. A good comparison might be the tip of an iceberg, only peaking out from the depths of the ocean once in a while."
With a finger, my brother spun the smoke lazily drifting in front of him.
That smoke was the ocean, and his finger poking through it was the tip of the iceberg. In a way, it just made me want to comment of how wishy-washy the collective unconscious of humanity was.
"In short, to put it simply, it's not just about people picking what they like and dislike. Our tastes are not decided by some purely innate function of our being, but rather are shaped gradually by the influences of our environment. If you follow that line of logic, it even gives you an example of the inherent beauty of religion."
"Religion?"
"Yes. Religion acknowledges the beauty of that ideal, and so steeps itself in it. That's why even something like Christianity, despite being so strict against idol worship, still has such a passion for artistic representations of Mary. The beauty of their ideals are made a set with the beauty of their art - it's a method many religions have used in the past to secure more followers."
Like that, my brother explained the beauty of religion.
At one time, a large number of people decided a particular thing was beautiful, so the religion spread from one person to an entire area, and in some cases, from that area to the entire world.
"As such, even religion is not completely unrelated to this idea of a time-limited 'fashion.' For example, Mithraism and Manichaeism both bore out of the same geographical region, and each repeatedly grew and declined in alternation with each other. It works out so perfectly it could lead you straight to positing some force like a limited collective unconscious to motivate the constant shift."
"Hold on a second. Are you trying to say that even the religion which people follow is just a matter of fashion?"
"Right."
With a nod, my brother confirmed a theory that would get one eliminated from the Holy Church in an instant.
"In short, the type of religion one might find appealing changes based on fashion. The difference with major religions are that they have multiple angles from which to attract believers, and so can simply switch methods as necessary to match the changing times. Buddhism has Mahayana and Hinayana. Christianity has Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. At first glance it might seem like they offer different viewpoints, but that's simply the result of the religion changing to match the fashion of the time."
"I see. This has been quite the magnificent conversation," I closed one of my eyes as I spoke. Maybe I got some smoke in it or something.
Just as clothing and fashion cycled out of vogue every ten or twenty years, even the appeal of a cultural institution like religion grew and declined in cycles if you widened your lense to hundreds or thousands of years.
It reminded me of a particular bit of history passed down within the Clock Tower.
Paradigm Shift.
An irreversible change, one that could never be taken back.
The Age of Gods had ended, the Age of Fairies had ended, and the Age of Man had arrived. And surely, beyond that, another new Age lay waiting beyond the horizon.
"Now, my lady, to which of these beauties were you referring?" Raising his cigar, my brother spoke up again.
His eyes were locked directly on me.
"I wonder."
"I think you aren't referring to something like passing fashions, or beauty as revealed by mathematics. No, you are probably talking about something else - something like, if a human being could
personify beauty. Am I right?"
My brother struck right to the heart of the matter.
Maybe I gave out a few too many hints.
"Was that question too easy?" I replied with a chuckle, sticking my tongue out at him.
In this world, legends of beautiful women were nothing if not plentiful.
Cleopatra.
Yang Guifei.
Helen of Troy.
Even putting aside the Three Beauties of History, this definition of beauty was a well-worn one.
Depending on the time or era, there would always be people who found long necks, or long toes, or long hair to be beautiful. That was no doubt the 'fashion' my brother was talking about earlier. Not just what was popular at any given time, but also at any given place. That was the definition my brother had given 'fashion.'
But...what if there was something that could exist entirely independant from that?
Would True Magic be able to reach a place like that?
As the smoke from his cigar entwined itself around his long black hair, my brother quietly spoke again.
"...I see. That social gathering was about the reveal of the Gold and Silver Princesses, wasn't it?"
Originally Posted by My F/GO Collab Dream Never
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
