Truthsayers
Author: Amata le Fay
Title: Truthsayers
Story: Ether Lands (RP)
Flavor(s): Summer Challenge Trope Bunnies 8 (magic A is magic A), Teaberry 21 (a truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent)
Toppings/Extras: None
Rating: PG
Word Count: 346
Notes: While everyone else is in the market getting involved in a riot, Asher, predictably, heads into a bookstore. // Worldbuilding!infodump in the context of one of Asher's spy missions.
“I'm looking for a book. Truthsayers by Nathaenel Shy?”
The words he is waiting to hear as confirmation are a trite little poem that refuses to stop prancing about in his head, and Asher questions for the first but not the last time how actually scholarly the scholar class was. They could have picked Eliot, with the beautiful yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes and licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, or even the over-quoted Frost and the road less traveled by which has apparently made all the difference. But no.
“A truth that's told with bad intent/Beats all the lies you can invent,” says the bookstore owner. He is an Eastasian spy working to find weaknesses in the Ocenianan government, a spy just like Asher. The old man slides the book over to young one. “Chapter Eleven is the most illuminating,” he says.
Asher immediately turns to it. He's read this book before, of course, but what matters now is what the owner of the bookstore has underlined.
This is, of course, the chapter in which the most highly-anticipated question in this book is addressed and, perhaps, settled, should every one of my postulates prove, in the long run, to be true. I must, of course, put in a word of warning that the theories this argument depends on-well, they are up-to-date as of 54 A.E., but should this book survive for years beyond that (and I must say that I most deeply wish for that to happen),most likely those theories will be further expanded upon, or else disproved.
That being said, where did ether come from? I speak not of the origin myth we all know, that the gods sent the gas from the heavens fifty-four years ago to prepare the earth so that celestial beings might wage war against Miqa of the Razored Bones. I speak of the scientific explanation, the chemical makeup of the gas...
Question every word they say.
4 Mire Street.
“Ah, fascinating,” said Asher. “On a completely unrelated note, where is Mire Street?”