Chapter 36 – A Marvelous Introduction

“Let me,” he said, “begin with a simple question.”

He made a brief, theatrical pause.

“How many fundamental Essences are there?”

He didn’t get an answer for quite a while because everyone suspected a trick. The answer was far too obvious. Any child could have answered it.

“Eight,” someone called out from the back rows, and a soft chuckle rippled through the hall.

“Eight,” Von Agrippin confirmed cheerfully. “You learn that before you even set foot in the university, I’m sure. It’s the answer you’ll find in any book. It’s so fundamental that most of us take it for granted, just like the fact that a compass has four cardinal directions.”

He picked up the heavy book lying on the lectern, raised it high, and let it fall. It hit the floor with a loud thud, and several people in the front row flinched in surprise.

“Or like the fact that things fall downward when there is no hand to hold them back.”

He didn’t bend down to pick up the book.

“My question is a different one,” he said. “Why eight?”

A murmur went through the audience, and someone laughed in surprise.

“Why not seven? Why not nine? Why not three or twelve?”

Now people actually seemed to pause. A shiver ran down Valentina’s spine as Von Agrippin simultaneously made an entire hall full of brilliant minds ponder why this question had never actually been asked and what significance might lie in its answer.

“In over a thousand years of refining our scholarly art,” Von Agrippin continued, and his voice had nothing lecturing about it, but rather sounded a bit as if he were simply sharing a puzzle with them that wouldn’t let him go, “no one has found a satisfactory answer to this question. Most scholars have stopped asking it altogether. But it has haunted me for the past fifteen years.”

He took a step to the side, away from the lectern, closer to the front row.

“I believe,” he said, “that I have found the beginning of an answer. Not the complete answer, that would be presumptuous, but at least a beginning. An idea of how the answer could look like. And if I am correct, then what might follow from this answer is of utterly unprecedented significance for the scholarly art.”

“He knows his craft,” remarked Vyxara. “He has the entire hall in the palm of his hand before he’s even shown a single pattern.”

“But,” Von Agrippin raised his hand, “I don’t want to convince you with mere assertions. I want to show you. To do so, however, I need Distilled Essence, and I would like to ask you to provide some for me. Perhaps there is a generous donor? So that not even the slightest hint of suspicion arises that I am working with prepared substances.”

Professor Veilford stood up and pulled a vial from his robe.

“Standard quality,” said Veilford as he held it out.

“Excellent. My thanks, Professor.” Von Agrippin accepted the vial, held it up so the entire hall could see it, and then opened it. “May I ask those present to confirm that this is normal, unadulterated Distilled Essence? Anyone able to perceive, please verify.”

Valentina saw, as did everyone else, who was able to, the normal, slightly shimmering Distilled Essence. Several professors and students nodded in confirmation.

“Good.” Von Agrippin placed the vial on the table next to the lectern and then turned to the empty space directly in front of him. He raised his hands gracefully, and Valentina noticed how his entire demeanor changed as the orator’s casual elegance gave way to the focused precision of the experienced Essence Weaver.

He constructed a circular pattern at first. It was a clean pattern with harmonious proportions that every first-year student immediately recognized as Leb-resonant. The incantation in Altothal that he spoke bore his Othalan accent, which shaped the vowels somewhat more sharply than was customary in Sommerland, but he possessed the flawless pronunciation of someone whose native language was much more closely related to Altothal than Sommerlandish was.

The warm, pulsating, and unmistakable glow of Leb Essence gathered within the pattern.

“What do you see?” asked Von Agrippin, without taking his eyes off his pattern.

“Leb,” said a voice from the second row. “A normal Leb resonance.”

“Agreed?” He directed the question at the professors.

General nodding. Professor Emberfell rolled her eyes slightly at his theatrical demeanor.

“Good.” Von Agrippin kept the pattern stable, and the Leb glow continued to pulsate steadily. “Now watch closely.”

He altered the pattern very slowly and gradually, without dissolving or rebuilding it.

He moved his well-groomed hands in a way that captivated Valentina as he stretched one side of the circular pattern, gently elongating it, while simultaneously compressing the opposite side. Subtly, another Altothal word appeared in his rhythmic incantation, and a mirror axis that had previously run symmetrically through the center of the circle shifted by a few degrees.

It was like watching a potter slowly transform a bowl into the shape of a vase without taking it off the wheel for even a second.

“The transformation is continuous,” explained Von Agrippin as he continued to work on the pattern. “I alter the geometric symmetries of the existing pattern through a sequence of stretches, reflections, and rotations, and every single step follows a prepared calculation.”

The pattern was no longer circular, but more indefinite, with flatter curves and more angles that hadn’t been there before.

And suddenly the Essence within the pattern changed.

The warm glow seemed to flicker, as if a second resonance were shimmering beneath the first.

“What do you see now?” asked Von Agrippin.

Valentina leaned forward with her mouth wide open. Impossible! The pattern resonated with Leb Essence, yes, but at the same time, in the same configuration, in the same place, there was something else, more flickering, more unstable. Viur. It was Viur.

Two Essence resonances simultaneously in a single pattern.

“That… that can’t be,” gasped someone a few rows in front of her.

Next to Valentina, Crispin had sat up straight as a board, and Innogen excitedly reached for Valentina’s hand and squeezed it.

“I see Leb and Viur,” Professor Veilford said loud, sounding as if he didn’t quite trust his own senses.

“That’s right.” Von Agrippin smiled, and it was clear that he was relishing this moment of surprise. “It’s an intermediate state. Both resonances are present because, at this moment, the symmetries of the pattern are partially compatible with both. That in itself is unusual enough but watch out.”

And then he continued.

The last curves of the original circle disappeared, the angles sharpened, and the proportions shifted even further, and then the Leb resonance vanished completely.

What remained was undeniably nothing other than pure, hot, flickering Viur. A Viur-resonant pattern, created from a continuous transformation of a Leb-resonant pattern, without a single interruption, without having been connected to another pattern. That should have been impossible.

Professor Emberfell stood up to look at the pattern from a different perspective, and two other professors followed her lead, while the murmur in the hall grew louder and louder.

Once they had a chance to examine it thoroughly, Von Agrippin dissolved the pattern, lowered his hands, and waited patiently, with aloof amusement on his face, until the hall had quieted enough that he could be heard again.

“Before you ask,” he said, “yes, it works the other way around, too. And no, it’s not an illusion.”

A nervous laugh rippled through the hall, breaking the tension a little.

“What you have just seen is the result of my work over the past fifteen years. I have systematically examined and compared the geometric symmetries of the resonant patterns of all eight Essences and made calculations based on them. In doing so, I discovered that the specific configurations that resonate with each individual Essence are not arbitrary, but related. And indeed, they are mathematically describable through transformation rules.”

The murmuring grew louder again, but fell silent shortly thereafter when Von Agrippin stopped speaking.

“Every Essence-resonant pattern can be derived from a single geometric form, which I call the Grundgestalt. This Grundgestalt possesses maximum symmetry, meaning it contains within itself the symmetries of all eight Essences simultaneously. Imagine a beam of light passing through a prism.”

He gestured with his hands to illustrate.

“A single white beam of light strikes a prism, and many different colors emerge. No one would claim that red light and blue light are fundamentally different things, they’re just light. They are different aspects of the same phenomenon, which can occur in nature in a broken form. I postulate that the eight Essences are in an analogous relationship to one another and are not eight independent forces of nature, but rather eight aspects of a single, deeper force, separated by geometric breaking of symmetry.”

“He’s right,” said Vyxara.

Valentina blinked. “What?”

“Not in every detail, and his explanation is incomplete, but the basic intuition that the Essences are not fundamentally separate is heading in the right direction.”

“Can you tell me more?”

“Later.”

“You always say that.”

“Listen, he’s not finished yet.”

Von Agrippin had turned toward the table and uncorked the Distilled Essence again, but this time he didn’t construct a simple Leb pattern but instead, he created something far more wondrous.

Valentina watched him weave the Essence and forgot to breathe for a moment.

The configuration unfolding in the space before him was hard to take in. It wasn’t confusing, the opposite, it possessed an almost painful clarity, with every line and every angle, every curve in exactly the right place. But the symmetry of the pattern, which simultaneously seemed to possess the circular elements meant to resonate with Leb, the angular structures of Viur, the flowing curves of Wazzer, and the square stabilities of Ard, was breathtaking.

And the Altothal he spoke as an incantation was not only technically correct, but downright artful. It could have been a poem.

“Extraordinary craftsmanship,” Vyxara praised appreciatively.

“This is a pattern imitating a partial symmetry of the Grundgestalt based on four Essences,” Von Agrippin announced.

The pattern resonated with Leb, Viur, Wazzer and Ard simultaneously and as one and it was challenging Valentina’s perception of Essence.

Then Von Agrippin transformed the superpattern, reducing the symmetries step by step until the circular elements came to the fore, and within a few moments, pure Leb-Essence shone forth in the pattern. He held the pattern for a moment so that everyone could see and confirm it.

Then he guided the pattern back, reversing the same transformation steps, and directed it further in another direction, reducing the symmetries to Viur.

And then back again and beyond, until the configuration became fluid and soft and undulating, and the shimmer of Wazzer Essence filled the pattern.

And back and on to Ard.

Four Essences transformed from a single multiresonant basic form, in continuous, comprehensible, and obviously reversible steps.

Von Agrippin dissolved the pattern, let his hands drop, and a thin film of sweat glistened on his forehead. The transformations had not been easy, that much was obvious.

“For Luvt, Lieht, Schate, and Zît,” he said, “the mathematical predictions of my theory foresee the same fundamental transformation rules. I am currently working on verifying these experimentally. Zît is the greatest challenge here, as the geometric symmetries of the Zît resonance are the most complex of all.”

He stepped back behind the podium.

“That is the state of my research. What I am postulating is, of course, a hypothesis and not a proven law, even though I naturally consider my hypothesis to be correct. If my hypothesis indeed is correct, then the eight Essences that we have treated as separate forces of nature for over a thousand years are not separate, but merely eight faces of the same force.”

Applause erupted in the auditorium, and Von Agrippin graciously accepted it before asking for silence with a placating gesture.

“I look forward to your questions.”

Hands shot up, and in the front row, several professors had stood up at once and had already begun to speak. Decan Valemont had to call for order twice before anything remotely resembling a civilized discussion could take place.

An elderly Master Weaver from the city was the first to speak and raised an objection that, judging by the murmurs of agreement, was clearly on many people’s minds. “With all due respect, Professor, but how do we know this isn’t simply a demonstration of your extraordinary dexterity? You are undoubtedly an experienced master, I don’t mean to deny that, but perhaps your dexterity allows your hands to make promises that the underlying mathematics can’t quite keep.”

Scattered laughter and nods of agreement.

Von Agrippin accepted the objection with obvious pleasure. “A valid question, and of course I will give you an honest answer. The transformations I have demonstrated today require considerable skill and also a certain, perhaps even extraordinary, dexterity. But let it be remembered that the first masters who demonstrated Essence Blending all those years ago faced exactly the same criticism. Today, Essence Blending is taught as a matter of course to advanced students, and most of the Essence Weavers here in this room regularly use linked pattern configurations that work with the effects of multiple Essences simultaneously.”

He smiled conciliatorily. “Several of my students in Othal have already succeeded in reproducing parts of the transformation sequence. None of them have yet managed the complete Grundgestalt imitation, I’ll admit. But after all, I’ve been refining it for fifteen years. It’s only a matter of time.”

Professor Emberfell spoke up and asked a technical question about the reversibility of the transformation, which Von Agrippin answered with the same blend of charm and resoluteness. A scholar from Bridgewater wanted to know if the transformation rules had already been published, to which Von Agrippin replied that a detailed treatise was in the works and he hoped to complete it during his year in Bridgewater.

Valentina listened to the questions, took note of the answers, and at the same time felt a question forming in her mind, which soon became like an itch between her shoulder blades that was hard to reach.

Next to her, Crispin murmured to Innogen and her, quietly enough that only they could hear. “What he’s doing is certainly elegant and groundbreaking, no question, but if all Essences and effects have the same origin, where then is the natural boundary between Essence Weaving and the demonic practices?”

Innogen glanced sideways at Valentina. “I don’t think that’s the question on Val’s mind right now.”

Valentina noticed the glance and the amused tone, but she was too busy trying to put her thoughts into words that were clear enough to say out loud.

“Ask him,” said Vyxara. “What you’re thinking right now is exactly the right question, and his answer will tell us a great deal about how deep his understanding really goes.”

“I don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to myself.”

“Asking a brilliant question isn’t a forbidden technique, Valentina. It’s just a brilliant question. And besides,” an inaudible giggle, “you won’t have peace of mind until you know anyway.”

Damn it. Of course she wanted to know.

She raised her hand.