agoge | >>FROM:@AEGONNER

It is so very strange that you speak of gods being forgotten and stories passing out of knowledge, and others being trapped here. Let me finish writing responses to other things, and then I'll meet you in the mess hall. This first part is something I've noted as a reoccurring theme.

Your Old Gods might have wisdom in some of their decisions though. I cannot say with any confidence.

Apollo was...complicated. He raised me, whereas my birth parents did not. Under his purview were the arts of prophecy, prophecy, music, the sun, poetry, and health. One of his temples, the one in Delphi, held an oracle that those from seemingly everywhere went to in order to make decisions both personal and at a state level. He can be as flippant as the other gods, but I also cannot mask fondness for him.

I'll see you presently.

[It is definitely easier to talk in person, and so Chiron does just that. He didn't think to alert Jon he'd be back in human mode again. He takes it for granted, and just finds Jon's table.]

Shall we continue?

[Jon looks up at Chiron with cautious pleasure. They've met and they haven't -- isn't that the way of it? A strange dream, but he knows now that it wasn't all a dream. He might have said too much, but he can't remember enough to be sure.]

Well met, Chiron. It's good to speak in person this time.

Apollo sounds as complicated as any god might. A little like the Lord of Light, but not much. Did he -- does he demand sacrifices?

[Something in his face goes flat and distant for a moment, but with a tiny shake of his head, his attention returns.]

[The in person statement may not be a joke, but there's a smile on Chiron's face that makes it clear that he saw humor in the statement. It's a light thing, matched with a sparkle of amusement in his eye.]

Easier to get a measure of me, I suppose.

[It is a jab at his own height compared to his centaur form, but Jon's question sucks any lightness that remains.]

Of animals, yes, sometimes. Most gods expect burnt offerings. But you're...[ah.] That isn't the kind of sacrifice you mean, I take it?

No.

[His expression shifts back inward.]

A burnt offering of an unbeliever, or a living girl. The Lord of Light isn't a god much worshipped in my land. I can't say I know whether or not he's real, only that I knew a priestess who insisted upon it, and who did -- wonderful and terrible things, but for the terrible things, I banished her.

Your Apollo sounds better. It's hard to imagine any of the gods I've heard of, named or not, raising the child of another -- or any child. It's hard to imagine them putting such a hand into the affairs of -- mortals.

[He nearly uses the word "men" there, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate, would it?]

[In different times, Chiron would have agreed with that evaluation of Apollo. But from the words of other Chiron, well, it seems that there have been changes there that Chiron can only label as a deep disappointment.

It's sad when human sacrifice is the more enjoyable thing to contemplate.]

Don't mistake me. It has been done before, but there is always a due paid out to whoever has taken that action. Or done something even more foolish, but those are deeply unpleasant tales.

[No one wants to hear about Lycaon.]

I'm not sure what they gain by being so remote, but I suppose it must work for them. They're still worshiped, correct?

Aye, they're still worshipped, though it's said they have little power in places where their worshippers are few. The weirwoods of the Old Gods were chopped down in the south to make way for the Seven after the Andals came to Westeros from Essos, and the Seven don't have much sway in the North. No sway at all north of the Wall, actually -- though you must understand, the Wall doesn't divide the North from the southern kingdoms. It protects the North from the White Walkers that come from the Land of Always Winter.

There was a man who sacrificed to them, too, though I don't think many others would worship them as gods. They fear them as monsters.

[Chiron nods to show that he is following along. There is migration, which was nothing he experienced in life, but the idea of competeing gods is something familiar in all of this.]

There has been no true conflict between the Old Gods and the Seven though, unless I am mistaken? Or their respective believers? I'm happy to leave the matter of the Wall and the practical purposes it has aside from the question.

[Layering too many things into a discussion of new and unfamiliar gods is hardly a wise decision.]

No. Southrons have never ventured far into the North -- it's not hospitable territory to them, and our bonds of loyalty run deep -- and most Westerosi call the gods "The Old Gods and the New." They coexist, as far as it goes. There's not much to keep anyone from worshipping all of them. There's also not much to keep someone who worships the Seven from thinking that someone who worships the Old Gods is a savage, or to keep a Northerner from thinking that someone who holds to the Seven is a southron fool.

But there was the Faith Militant, long ago. The North is one of seven kingdoms, but it wasn't always; it used to stand alone. About three hundred years ago, a Valyrian man, a dragonlord named Aegon Targaryen, came from his home on Dragonstone and conquered five of them with his dragon Balerion the Black Dread and his sisters' dragons, Meraxes and Vhagar. My ancestor, Torrhen Stark, bent the knee to him, so the North was never attacked, and we were allowed some of our ancestral rights.

The Targaryens adopted the Faith of the Seven, but they practiced... well, they often married brother to sister. The Faith didn't like that. The Faith Militant were those who fought against the crown for a while because of it.

[The fairly low level of conflict is something that Chiron finds impressive. It shows not just in his raised eyebrows, but at the faint smile playing at the corners of his mouth. There's a luxury to gods not behaving badly, and he'd like to luxuriate in it for a moment before things take a turn for the serious.]

I presume that the use of the past tense and the crown having dragons meant that their fight was completely and utterly unsuccessful.

[He...is leaving the incest alone, mostly because the gods of his own time have made it so funky that he gets to pass zero moral judgement on the matter.]

You'd think the dragons would have deterred them, but that isn't why, though Aegon's son Maegor the Cruel did attack them with Balerion more than once -- something about the succession, and about him having more than one wife. They all fought ordinary battles too, with men on the ground.

Maegor's successor Jaehaerys made peace with the Faith Militant by pardoning the ones who would lay down their swords. The Faith only had to acknowledge the Targaryen marriages, they didn't have to approve of them.

[He shakes his head, blinks, and half-chuckles.]

My old Maester would be pleased that I can remember all that. I had other heroes as a boy, not Maegor or Jaehaerys.

Consider me truly surprised that the dragons weren't the end of the matter. [It's a messy business, in the end. That does have a patina of the familiar, the gods knew men could be fools over successions and crowns.]

Knowing history is always a useful thing. Consider me pleased in his place, it's fascinating to hear.

[Chiron pauses, before asking his next question. It could be a bit too personal.] May I ask who, if it isn't a private thing?

Oh, my greatest hero was the Young Dragon. Another Targaryen, Daeron I... the real dragons were dead by then, but a three-headed dragon is the Targaryen sigil. He conquered Dorne, the southernmost of the Kingdoms, when he was fourteen years old, but he only held it for a fortnight.

He lost sixty thousand men. Not a hero now.

[His expression becomes thoughtful again, lips pressed lightly together and brows drawing down, and his next words come out more slowly.]

You get older, and it's less the men in stories and more the men you've known who you look up to, at least if you've been lucky enough to know good ones. I have been. The Young Dragon was brave, but no one should lose that many men, least of all in a boy's failed attempt to win glory.

Edited (minor improvements.) 2018-01-24 04:28 (UTC)

Feats beyond one's age always encourages the term to be bandied around. Regardless of failure, it is an impressive thing to have accomplished. A shame it ended in a catestrophic loss.

[It is pointless when there is death for the glory of only one.]

Are your nobles raised with the concept of κλέος?

[He quickly adds:] In my time, it means accomplishing great tasks so that others will hear of your works and add to your renown.

When the Targaryens took Dorne and kept it, they took it another way... a marriage alliance, with the first Daenerys and a Dornish prince. Not the Daenerys who's here now.

[He doesn't understand the word κλέος as it's said to him, but as it's explained, he absorbs it, nods, and considers it before speaking again.]

Not in the North, though there are heroes. The southrons have their knightly virtues, winning glory in tournaments and battle and such, but there are few tournaments or knights in the North, because so few follow the Seven. When Northmen fight, we want to win and to live.

Most Northern boys seem to want to be heroes of some sort when they're boys, but it's a childish thing. I did, because I'm a bastard. There was small glory to be found in the Night's Watch, as it happened, yet the Watch is necessary to the safety of the Realm. Most have forgotten that.

How long ago was that particular conquest? I presume the contemporary's name is in reference to this particular ancestor.

[Direct line or not, it's within the same family.

Chiron shifts in his seat, and listens carefully to Jon's reply. It's an interesting divide, and one that seems to hinge on survival versus having a certain amount of time to devote to battle for the sake of it.

It's a matter that didn't exist in his own time, and yet that kind of personal glory still manifested.]

I see. I assume that your south has more lesiure time to devote to these tournaments and battles then, whereas where you grew up has to be more focused on practical matters?

[He wants confirmation, if nothing else.]

....I suppose the distance of your wall has something to do with where it stands in memory?

The alliance? For us, oh -- over one hundred years, and about thirty after The Young Dragon's conquest. The first Daenerys wasn't her ancestor -- maybe the sister of an ancestor. The rest of us from Westeros are not of Valyrian blood, and so you don't see some of those names much outside of the Targaryen family, unless someone wanted to flatter them.

The one here is the last of them -- the last Targaryen.

[A skeptical expression crosses his face at that one: he intends that she won't be the last, but neither of them can be sure of the future.

He moves on to explain some particulars of his homeland, and the look on his face falls away, leaving only one that's normal in a serious conversation.]

The North doesn't produce much. Wool, wood, plenty of deer and wolves to hunt, but sometimes the land doesn't yield much... and winters can be hard, if they stretch on three or four years or more. We don't have gold mines like they do in the south, or lush farms like in the Reach -- which is quite far south.

Winterfell... my home [he inclines his head here, remembering his dream]... is relatively central in the North, but it's still 500 leagues from the capitol, and there's not much north of it that's of any interest to southrons... mountains, forests, bare fields, little villages, the seats of a few smaller Houses. The Wall is 200 leagues north of Winterfell. I suppose most of them don't think of it at all. Or if they do, they think it's not worth thinking about, that it's only there to keep out wildling raiders.

Still, I've seen lords from the south who once mocked the Watch go grey at the sight of what we really stood against.

Edited 2018-02-01 05:48 (UTC)

Apologies for using the wrong word. [But, poing taken. There are family trees that probably twist and turn as well, something tricky to track and why there are probably men who are paid to track such information.] But I follow you as far as length goes. And flattery, although I have to wonder if the flattery is truly that common.

[At the mention of last, Chiron's face flickers and becomes something more pensive.] That's an unfortunate distinction for anyone to have. [But not one that Chiron feels right commenting on further. No one likes to dwell on that particular sort of information.]

Mm, is there a particular boundary line that defines where the south ends and the north begins? From what you're describing based on the products of each area, it seems to me that there would be a sort of natural line where the farmland tapers off and becomes the realm of shepherds and your own people.

[The impact of climate on who produces what is something Chiron absolutely understands. The required ores to make metal and weapons aren't everywhere in Greece, and a city can be made on reputation for a particular good.]

Out of sight, out of mind. [It's too neat of a summation for the circumstance, but it seems to be a painfully true one.] Is this sight of what the wall is for a relatively recent matter?

[ AUNT FUCKER, BOW CHICKA UNFF UNFF ]

[THIS CAN'T POSSIBLY BE TRUE. HE'S NED STARK'S BASTARD, OKAY? IF HE WERE RHAEGAR TARGARYEN'S SON HE WOULD BE KING OF ALL SEVEN KINGDOMS AND HE IS DEFINITELY NOT THAT, DANY!

but also who cares what the Faith of the Seven thinks. sounds fake. probably Cersei trying to break our alliance again.]

>>FROM:@AEGONNER

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in which Aegon Targaryen talks about Aegon Targaryen without knowing that he too is Aegon Targaryen.

This is definitely the New and Improved version of Who's on First

Aegon Toast

The noise I just made

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not here not ever here

[EVEN MORE ABSENT]