[OPEN] The Glass Spider Had Blue Eyes Almost Like A Human's

[northerndragon]

WHO? Jon Snow, Ghost, and... maybe you?
WHAT? Spider-time Training, Fish Exploration, Direwolf Meet and Greets, Birch Story Grind Sessions, etc.
WHEN? Backdated into late March and forward-dated up to the launch of the Jhashch Mission in mid-April.
ANYTHING ELSE? This network post. Also, everything is OTA whether or not I marked it OTA, unless it's very specifically marked closed.

[For those who haven't met him: Jon is of middling height, slender and well-muscled, with longish, curling black hair and warm dark eyes, sometimes lively and sometimes sad. He speaks with a broad and pronounced Northern accent, which in real-world terms sounds like an English accent from Yorkshire or thereabouts.]

Comments

[horsepowered]

"I can't get into details."

Chiron had shared some level of information with Chiron. Even explaining that was information that was probably risky, and so it was safer to say nothing at all. Jon was smart enough to draw his own conclusions anyway.

"On my own timeline, the age I was a part of has long since faded. Everyone as well." And he was out of time and space regardless as a Heroic Spirit. That was a truth he always knew.

There's a gentleness in response to the rest of Jon's thoughts, and Chiron does understand. "It may well be desire based. But from all you've spoken of him, he seems a moral guide to you as well. To crave council of those one trusts is natural, regardless of that person's status among the living or dead."

[northerndragon]

Something happens in his posture: it twists until he's making a slow, helpless shrug.

"Maybe it's that once you see one person you should never have been able to see again, or you know that someone else has seen that sort of person, you start wanting to see all of them... the ones who died before their time. The Old Bear -- my old Lord Commander, before I was chosen -- he would be a great asset to COST, yet I've never wasted too much time wishing he was here. My father had less experience as a soldier, might not want to fight at all. Might agree to fight in the face of the risks. Might be that he was a moral guide to me, that's true enough: I've never gone wrong by asking myself what he would do."

His face sobers even more before he continues, "But might be that I just want to see him again and tell him what's happened. There are probably people who feel the same for you. If I'm lucky, if I'm to be very lucky, there may be some who feel the same for me."

[horsepowered]

"I don't doubt you are that fortunate."

Kind words before more thoughtful ones. It's not a rule, but it is what comes out regardless. There is a long, sobering breath from Chiron. It's too easy to think of stories right now - Orpheus comes to mind - harder to consider anything real.

"Some of what you describe, I think, is a part of memories being stirred up again and bringing those who are gone back into the present of your thought process. The rest," the rest is what we make of it.

"The rest I cannot say, divine, interpret, do anything of the sort. It simply is."

[northerndragon]

No one can know. He's aware of it: there's at least as much chance that he'll go home when all of this is over and then the Night King will win, or Cersei will, or Dany will win with his help... but the witch will have been right about her barrenness, and it won't matter how many sons or daughters either of them has dreamed of. Any of these things could happen, or none of them: he could get everything he's ever wanted and die of a fever a year on.

Still, he knows that what Chiron is saying is kind.

"It simply is. But it has to be the memories.

"If the Regency can go back to any point in time, can make my world as if it's never existed, can wash me or Dany or anyone we know away, aren't we fighting for the memories as much as for what may come down the line? So you fight for your wife, I fight for my father, even for Dany's father. Has she told you anything of her father?"

[horsepowered]

"That's one way of putting it, but I think that there's something about the word memory that implies a level of sentimentality that..." what's the best way to say it? "It does and doesn't serve us well. Sentimentality is a great motivator for a fight, but it can hamstring it as well."

He had chided Achilles for being soft hearted in battle, after all.

"Framing this as preservation of what has been, and what has made us who we are today is more constructive. In this moment, we are the crux of past and future. And that the Regency hasn't gone back to fiddle says something too."

But there is a curiosity here in what Jon has brought up. "The topic has come up very little. Why?"

[northerndragon]

"Not sentimentality, only -- it isn't only for our children. It's for Torrhen Stark -- the King-Who-Knelt -- or for Aegon himself, or Nymeria. The heroes of the past, maybe even the Last Hero himself. Elsewise they've fooled us into thinking there's some glorious purpose.

"Wouldn't be the first to get men to fight that way."

A long sigh, and he shakes his head in response to the centaur's question.

"Her father was -- she wouldn't have spoken of him much. A madman, the Mad King. She never knew him. Never knew her mother, either." I was luckier than her. Even if my father dishonored himself with my mother, he was a good man, and I knew him. That much is inescapable.

[horsepowered]

"It may well be that for some, that may be the case. And for others, we may be accounting for our own perspectives and motivations that justify what we do here. Personal motivations are exactly that, and one can interpret those as, as you say, glorious purpose. In my own time, we spoke of κλέος - what was heard about someone else, and how their deeds were understood and interpreted by others."

A dangerous concept, κλέος. One that sent many a man to his ruin. Chiron knows full well his own students thought of it, that he had bought into the concept when he instructed. But that had been the word and demands of the day.

"Why do you bring the matter up, may I ask? Especially as we speak of other things?" There had to be a logic to the line of query, otherwise it was...strange to just speak of.