many a blood red carpet my unsteady feet have trod

[heardmermaids]

Who: Sebastian and Martel
What: Meet, greet, and sharing time.
Where: Martel's abode. Yes, he has an abode.
When: Shundi
Warnings: None. Yet.

At the appointed time and place, Sebastian heads off to meet Martel. He's brought along a few things that he knows he'll need - wand, knife, and dog - and roughly thought through what he wants to say about how he'd learned that magic worked, how he lost his own, and why he thinks most of the rules in his world are a bit bunk. There's a moment where he thinks he ought to be nervous, but the edginess doesn't settle in.

Comments

[apostatised]

The sheer extent of warding on the small castle can be intimidating to some in and of itself; to say that Martel appreciates his privacy is a profound understatement of the case. Martel viciously protects said privacy, and there's nothing shy about the way in which he does it - the sensitive can feel it from the street outside the property, and though the wards allow inquiries as close as the front door, it's clear no one comes in (...or goes out?) without the master of the house's say so.

He's expecting Sebastian, though, and it's a simple enough matter to let him in. Martel doesn't quite smile, but he doesn't look as unfriendly as the peterbald cat watching suspiciously from just around the corner of the hall, to say the least-

“My study is in the tower- follow me.”

[heardmermaids]

The glare from the cat reminds Sebastian of meeting Crookshanks for the first time and while he knows the look should put him ill at ease, it only serves to reinforce the opposite. Alley is less sure, but will trail along beside or behind Sebastian as needed.

"Thank you." Once he's regained his former apartment, Sebastian intends to adjust his own warding to make it a bit less general. Currently, it's a bizarre sort of bodge-job that's anchored to a lightswitch by the front door.

[apostatised]

The study is laid out not dissimilarly to the study where Martel was dressed down on numerous occasions for various youthful infractions as a novice of the knighthood; it's as perverse as it is apt, but it's also functional and mercifully unobvious where his (many) personal demons are concerned. Little in the way of his sorcery is done up here - all that is down in the cellars, where the warding ensures he bother the neighbors (and damage his home) as little as possible, and that is where, presuming they continue after this interview, Sebastian will do his learning.

But this is only a conversation, to begin, and he waves Sebastian down into a seat.

“We start with discussion,” he says, shooing Sarathi from the doorway with his foot and shutting the door, firmly, after him. “What do you want from this, Mr LeMat?”

[heardmermaids]

"In my own world, magical education is set into a rigid pattern and there's little to no room for experimentation for anything beyond a set, schoolboy curriculum. If you pass your exams at eighteen, you're done and learned all there is to know, ready to go to work." From his tone of voice, it's pretty clear that Sebastian doesn't think much of this system but he might once have accepted it as perfectly normal. "I had my magical ability removed and now that I've been slowly regaining it, I find that I don't always conform to the set roster of spells and charms. I don't know that I want to relearn them, but I want to be adaptable and functional."

[apostatised]

Martel's gaze sharpens interestingly on magical ability removed - familiar, that, and something that he would choose not to engage with off his own back, if he's honest. He acknowledges it, privately, and moves on.

“Tell me of how your ability was removed,” he says, fingers steepled. “Tell me about the set roster - about how you think of 'adaptability'.”

[heardmermaids]

"Standard practice is that every wizard uses a wand and a set list of phrases to cast spells. It's not really the done thing to cast wandless or change the wording - doing that is either a sign of power or being subversive, usually both. That's not to say there aren't new things being created, but they're just retreads of the same old ideas."

"I did poorly in school for a host of reasons. One of the greatest is that from the start I ended up fighting off and on in a war." He frowns and tries to work out how best to explain that particular mess. "I think you need a bit more backstory. The leader of the other side was obsessed with the idea of immortality and previously had split his soul into multiple fragments with the intent to hide them in powerful objects so that if his body died, he could create another."

"Also, he - Voldemort - came to the conclusion that all boys born on a certain day might be the only ones that could kill him. So, he came to my parents' home and when he tried to kill me, his curse shattered and ended up destroying his body and I didn't know it at the time, it stuck a piece of him into me. Magically, I mean."

[apostatised]

“Immortality is a profoundly overrated gift,” Martel observes, thinking in passing of Otha - whose immortality had in the end not been absolute, as wretched as his god. (Not theirs. Even in retrospect, Azash was never truly his god.) “As is prophecy. Go on.”

[heardmermaids]

"I whole-heartedly agree," he replies with some emotion behind it. Perhaps Sebastian has had his own run-ins with living too long?

"A family was browbeaten into keeping me alive until my eleventh birthday when I was told that magic was real - it's all hidden in my world, closed off into their own little corner - and taken away to school to be taught and to start fighting." Admittedly, he's painting in broad strokes, but should Martel want further information, he need only ask. "The war was quiet for a few years, but became more, ah, active when I was about fifteen. It was mainly a guerilla affair with a group of untrained youth on the one side and established wizards on the other."

"I wouldn't say that having less to lose was an advantage, per se, but it changed how we fought. Still, years in, we were looking at either an outright failure or a, and I don't know if the term will translate, a Pyrrhic victory. We..." Others may have participated in the ideas, but it was Sebastian that made the offers and paid the price. "I made deals to get two rare objects: a needle and thread that could sew anything together and a knife that could sever just as much."

"Using the connection I had to Voldemort, I bound my magic to his and then removed them both. By this point, we'd already destroyed all the other soul fragments and as a mortal, I was able to kill him."

[apostatised]

“Clever.” It's a statement of fact, impossible to discern whether or not Martel could be said to approve - Sebastian isn't telling him this to be praised for it but because it needs to be known, so he makes his observation and moves on, absorbing what he's being told without letting himself get bogged down or preoccupied. “Tell me the practicalities. You and I know better than to settle for the blank, shrugging 'it's magic'- what did it mean for you, to lose your ability? Is it blood, physicality, or as bound to soul as the rest of your tale?”

[heardmermaids]

"Magic is an inherited trait. I don't think it can be wholly removed and the knife just severed the connection between myself and my innate magic - broke all the pathways, but couldn't actually get rid of anything." Hermione insisted in reviewing and revising the wording of the request until she got the balance just right. "I had one spell left to me and I still registered as a wizard to the point that I could walk down hidden streets, but I couldn't perform the magic needed to enter them."

"The way the wizards use magic is as a tool to make their daily lives easier - small, standard spells to heat the kettle, to sweep the floors or mend a shirt." It's only after he says it that Sebastian notices he didn't lump himself in with 'the wizards'.

[apostatised]

“The commonplace and the complex.”

A moment later, “Particularly if you're at all especially gifted, your fine control will be the first issue you face; you're changed, irreversibly, and as such the way that you channel what you do changes. You've the power of a man in the clumsy hands of a newborn child- you are, in effect, as a child with a stick. How many children know the strength of their own hands?”

It's almost wry; it sounds like he's speaking from experience.

[heardmermaids]

"Exactly." He'd been trying a few of the simple things he'd learned in school, but they don't feel right. "A few months after I came to Baedal, I went and spoke to the priestesses of Shada and, well, I've regained access to my magic but it's changed or I've changed. The methods I knew don't work properly and while I've had a few years since then, I'm still...out of alignment? Out of sorts? I'm not sure how to describe it. A few things work and work brilliantly, but I've lost the knack for most of it."

[apostatised]

Martel shakes his head, leaning back in his seat. “You're trying to go backwards,” he says, more patiently than might have been anticipated, having ever met the man. “Old tasks and new hands. That you don't do things the same way now as you did as a boy would be natural enough if you'd lived a quiet, unremarkable life performing quiet, unremarkable feats. The violence of change makes it apparent in a way you've got to account for, moving forward. So long as you think of yourself as a broken tool,” which is a presumption and a half, but in its own way reflective of the last conversation they'd had, about listening, “you'll keep yourself treading water. I'm no blacksmith and you're no artifact.”

[heardmermaids]

"And that's what it has been, treading water. When I went back, I looked for anything I could find that might have some bearing on how to adjust, but it's all so standardized." Sebastian doesn't say that it's dangerous to deviate from the Proper Wizarding Tradition, but it might carry through in his tone. Just because of who he is and what he's done, performing a different sort of magic would frighten people.

[apostatised]

The smile he gets for his trouble is thin and familiar. “How frightened men will always be of their own power.”

...right. Yes. Veering away from supervillain speeches and back into safe teaching territory, he regards Alley with an absent-minded frown, his mind elsewhere as he considers what to say next and the expression seeming habitual. He'd frowned at his father's hounds only for being present, too, resignedly tolerant.

(However piously Romiar swore that he gave Petrana a pup only because they seemed to please her so, Martel has long suspected his father found his irritation with the gift as amusing as Petrana's delight. Doubtless it suits her country knight better, now.)

“I'm not to teach you my discipline,” he says, eventually. “There's no guarantee it'd suit you. What I offer is mastery of your own- through experimentation and technique guidance. It's as much a matter of mind as it is power. Moreso, in some cases.”

[heardmermaids]

Sebastian seems almost relieved.

"Provided you've a place with good wards and shielding, that sounds like what I'd prefer. Working alone, I'd little safe opportunity to experiment, but should you ever need curses broken or household repairs, I'm not too shabby there." He knows it's possible to relearn new methods of magic, but it's not the sort of thing that really should be tried without a safety net.

[apostatised]

“My workspaces are beneath the castle itself,” he says, with a brief and eloquent flick of his fingers - his mannerisms are lordly and military at once, an odd blend of what he thinks of as old bad habits. Has he any other kind? Unlikely. “Their wards are extensive, and I'm able to adjust for my students as I need to. You'll be obliged to trust me more than I'm aware seems terribly wise--” so he's not without a sense of humour, “--but remember it's hardly in my best interests to sabotage you in my home.”

[heardmermaids]

"I haven't scaled the lofty heights of home repair by playing it overly safe." Har, har. They ought to take their act on the road.

"What else do you think you'll need to know?"