Thursday's lecture went differently. He'd given them a reading — a foundational text on moral philosophy, about forty pages — and had told them to come in ready to talk about it. About two thirds of them had done the reading. The other third had not, where there was only awkward silence when he asked a question that required having done it.
True to his word, the Grimthorn was on the lectern. Several students had stared at it when they came in. Nobody had asked about it yet.
"Okay," he said, after the third such silence from someone who clearly hadn't read. "Show of hands! Who didn't do the reading?"
Nobody raised their hand.
"That's impressive, because several of you have been very quiet for very specific questions." He looked at the room. "I'm not going to make this a test. Just do the reading. It's here to help you think, not to test you."
A boy in the second row — Corvin, according to his seat plan — raised his hand.
"I did the reading," Corvin said. "I just didn't understand most of it."
Several people around him sighed in relief, like he'd said something they'd all been thinking.
"What didn't you understand?" Lymur asked.
"The part about — " Corvin looked at his notes, "— moral realism. I don't know what that means in practice."
"Okay. Good. That's exactly where we're starting." Lymur stepped away from the lectern. "Moral realism is the position that moral facts exist independently of what anyone thinks about them. Not made, not agreed upon — just true, like how mathematical facts are true." He looked at Corvin. "Can you give me an example of something you think is just wrong?"
Corvin thought about it. "Uhm… hurting someone for no reason."
"Okay. Is that wrong because people decided it was, or is it wrong regardless of what anyone decides?"
Corvin opened his mouth. Stopped.
"Take your time," Lymur assured him.
From the back, Mira said, "It's wrong regardless. The wrongness doesn't depend on consensus."
"Ashcroft," Lymur said, "I'm asking Corvin."
Mira sat back. She looked slightly annoyed but didn't push it.
Corvin was still thinking. "I think — it feels like it's just wrong. Like it would be wrong even if everyone somehow agreed it wasn't."
"Very good," Lymur said. "That intuition is the foundation of moral realism. Now here's the problem." He looked at the class. "If moral facts exist independently — what are they made of? Where do they live? You can point to a physical fact. You can measure it. How do you point to a moral fact?"
The room was quiet.
"That's the problem," Lymur said. "And nobody's solved it. We're going to spend a lot of time sitting with that problem and not solving it, and hopefully by the end you'll have a better sense of why it matters that we can't."
Corvin wrote something in his notes. Then looked up. "Is this going to be on the exam?"
"There are no exams," Lymur said. And before anyone could celebrate, "There'll be essays by the end of the semester, though. One long one. The question will be something I haven't told you yet because I haven't decided it yet."
"That seems unfair," someone said.
"It's the most fair thing I could do. An exam tests what you've memorized. An essay tests what you've actually thought about. Those are different things." He looked at the class. "I'm not interested in what you remember. I'm interested in what you think."
After the Thursday lecture Mira caught up with him in the hallway.
"Professor Lymur."
He turned. She was walking fast to match his pace.
"Yo what's up, Ashcroft."
"You said I have a structural problem in my argument." She said it directly, no preamble. "I've been thinking about it since Tuesday and I can't find it."
"Good, then."
She looked at him. "Uh… that's not helpful."
"It's the most helpful answer I can give you. If I told you what it was you'd fix it and move on. Not finding it means you're examining the whole thing, which is more important… probably." He glanced at her. "You'll get it. Give it another week."
She walked beside him for a few more steps. "Can I ask you something else?"
"Sure."
"Do you actually believe morality is constructed? Or is that just a position you're using to make us argue?"
Lymur stopped at the stairwell door and looked at her. "What do you think?"
"I think you actually believe it," she said. "But I also think you've done things you considered justified that other people would consider wrong, and you've made peace with that, and the constructed framework is part of how you do that."
He looked at her for a second.
"Hehe, you're very perceptive," he said.
"So I'm right?"
"You're not wrong." He pushed the stairwell door open. "But that's not the same thing."
She made a frustrated sound behind him that he found genuinely endearing.
He stopped on the first step. "Ashcroft."
"What?"
"Do you know what a Sorrowbloom is?"
She blinked. "No?"
"It's a flower. Deep purple, grows in mountain regions. In traditional Salian botany it symbolizes someone who is extremely close to the answer but keeps walking past it." He looked at her. "I'm going to put one on your desk next Tuesday."
Mira stared at him. "That's either encouraging or insulting."
He didn't reply and went down the stairs.
...…
By the end of the first week he had a routine.
Up at seven. Coffee at home, then a second coffee in the faculty lounge where Aldric was reliably already there and Sera was reliably eating the same thing. Office by nine, water Gerald, look over notes. Lecture at ten. Lunch in the office or occasionally, from Thursday of the first week onward, with Aldric in the faculty dining hall, which turned out to be fine once he found the building.
Aldric was good company.
He even wondered if they were friends.
He talked about his own subject like he had never gotten tired of it, which Lymur respected, and he asked questions about adventuring without being weird about who Lymur was.
"You actually enjoy teaching," Aldric said on Friday, over food.
"Yeah," Lymur said, slightly surprised to confirm it. "I do or I'm just good at it."
"Most people who come in from outside academia take a few weeks to settle." Aldric ate something. "You've been settled since your first day."
"Turns out I like talking about ideas," Lymur said. "That's basically what it is."
"It's also managing forty different personalities and doing it twice a week."
Lymur thought about this. "I hadn't thought of it that way."
"The Ashcroft dynamic is already campus gossip, by the way," Aldric said. "Apparently she went back to her dormitory on Tuesday and told her roommate she'd finally met a professor she couldn't steamroll."
Lymur looked at him. "Is that a compliment?"
"From Ashcroft, it's basically a declaration of love."
The second week started with rain.
Lymur walked to the academy from his apartment in it, which he hadn't minded in the slightest. The streets were quiet and the rain was good and the campus looked different in grey light.
He got to his office damp, changed into the spare jacket he'd started keeping there after day two, and sat down.
Gerald had perked up noticeably. He'd put him closer to the window.
"Looking better.
He went over his notes for Tuesday's lecture. He'd decided to move into moral responsibility — not what was right and wrong, but who bore the weight of it and under what conditions. It was going to produce arguments. He was looking forward to it.
Aldric knocked at nine-fifteen. "Coffee's done."
"'Kay~. Two minutes."
He went down. Sera was already there and had brought pastries from somewhere, which she put in the middle of the table without comment.
"Where did these come from?" Lymur asked.
"I have a source."
"She won't tell anyone," Aldric said. "We've tried."
Lymur took a pastry. It was excellent. He looked at Sera with new respect.
"Okay. What do you want?"
Sera looked at him. "I want nothing."
"Nobody brings pastries for nothing."
"I bring pastries every Monday," Sera said. "It's a thing I do. It has no ulterior motive."
Lymur looked at Aldric.
"It's true," Aldric added. "She just does it."
"It makes Monday better." Sera sounded slightly defensive.
...
Tuesday's second week lecture.
He'd put a small potted Sorrowbloom on Mira's desk before the class arrived, exactly as promised. She walked in, saw it, and stopped. Looked at it. Looked at him at the front of the room.
"Sorrowbloom," she said.
"Sorrowbloom," he confirmed.
"Someone who's extremely close to the answer but keeps walking past it."
"Correct."
She picked it up, put it in her bag without another word, and sat down. A few people around her looked at both of them in confusion. Corvin, next to her, leaned over and whispered something. She ignored him.
Lymur put the question on the board.
If you do the right thing for the wrong reason, is it still right?
"Okay," he said. "Go."
And so they went.
It was louder than the first week. The students were more comfortable, more willing to talk over each other, more willing to push back not just on Lymur but on each other.
Corvin turned out to have strong opinions about intention versus outcome and defended them stubbornly against three people at once. A girl named Petra, who had said almost nothing in the first week, came out of nowhere with a position on virtue ethics so clearly articulated that the room went briefly quiet.
Mira had found her structural problem. She announced this at the start of the discussion very proudly and then reformulated her original argument with the gap closed, and then looked at Lymur.
"Better?"
"Much better," Lymur replied. "Now I have a new problem for you."
She groaned while the class laughed.
"Smaller problem. You're getting there."
Toward the end of the lecture, during a lull, Tiss from the front row raised her hand.
"Professor, are all the flowers you bring in from Salian botany?"
"Most of them," Lymur said.
"Did you study them?"
"I read about them once. It stuck."
"Do you know one for — " she thought about it, "— for someone who's confused but too proud to say so?"
Lymur considered this. "Hmm… ah! Ashenveil lily. Grey petals, grows near stagnant water. Traditional symbol of, say, dignified confusion."
Corvin sat up. "Is that a real flower?"
"Don't ask me, look it up."
Corvin wrote it down very seriously. Three other people also wrote it down.
Mira was looking at Lymur trying to decide if she was being played. "Are you making these up?"
Lymur picked up his notes. "That's an interesting question for an ethics class," he said. "Does it matter if they're made up if the meanings are accurate? Anyways, that's all for today. Thursday, same question, new angle. Go to the library and read the case study in the packet."
After class Corvin stayed behind.
"Professor," Corvin said, gathering his things slowly.
"Corvin. Yes?"
"The question on the board." He paused. "I keep thinking about it and I can't figure out which way I actually land on it."
"That's because it's genuinely hard," Lymur said. "There isn't a clean answer."
"Then how are we supposed to write an essay about it?"
"The essay isn't about landing on an answer," Lymur said. "It's about showing your work. How you got where you got. Why you think what you think." He looked at Corvin. "What's your instinct?"
"My instinct is that — it matters why you did it. Even if the outcome is fine." Corvin frowned. "But I can't defend that well."
"Then work on defending it," Lymur said. "Your instinct's not bad."
Corvin nodded slowly. He picked up his bag. At the door, he stopped. "Professor Lymur."
"Yeah?"
"Are you actually as young as you look?"
Lymur smiled. "I thought I clarified this on the first day. Why?"
"Because you talk about doing wrong things like someone who's actually done them. Not like someone who read about it."
Lymur looked at him for a second. "Get to your next class, Corvin."
Corvin left.
He stopped in the doorway one more time. "What flower would you give someone who's asking the right question but not sure they want the answer?"
Lymur thought about it. "Hollowbell. It's white and very delicate. Symbolizes the courage of continuing to look at something uncomfortable."
Corvin nodded. Wrote it down in the margin of his notes right there in the doorway.
"Is that one real?" he asked, one more time.
"Get your ass to class, Corvin."
Corvin left.
Kid's going to be trouble, Lymur thought. He meant it as a compliment.
...…
Thursday, second week.
He'd assigned a shorter reading — a case study of a real historical incident involving a mage who had used destructive magic to stop a greater harm and had destroyed a village in the process.
The ethics of proportionality.
Necessary harm.
Who decided what was necessary and by what authority?
The class came in surprisingly ready.
He put a new flower on the lectern. Dark red, tightly closed.
Tiss clocked it immediately from the front row. "What's that one, Professor?"
"Dreadclove," Lymur said. "Anyone know what it symbolizes?"
Nobody did.
"In Salian tradition it was placed in rooms where a difficult verdict was about to be handed down. It meant — there is no comfortable answer here, and you already know it." He looked at the room. "Seemed appropriate for today so I ordered ahead of time."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Then a boy near the front said, "Before we start — I want to flag something."
His name was Finch, and he was small. He said sharp things occasionally in week one. "I want to flag something."
"Go ahead," Lymur said.
"The case study is about a mage. But you're not just any mage." Finch looked at him steadily. "You're an S-class adventurer. There are things you've done that are probably relevant to this exact topic. Are we going to talk about those?"
The room fell into silence.
Lymur looked at Finch. Perceptive kid, he thought. Also brave, or maybe just very committed to the bit.
"What, specifically, are you asking?" Lymur asked.
"I'm asking if your personal ethics — the ones you've actually applied — are on the table in this room."
Lymur set his folder down. Leaned against the lectern, next to the Dreadclove. "Yes," he said. "They're on the table. Ask what you want to ask."
Finch seemed slightly surprised that this had worked. "There are stories about you and a specific incident in the Beast Glades. An AA-class adventurer."
"Yes," Lymur said.
"They say you killed him."
"Yes, that's absolutely right."
"Outside of any legal framework. On your own judgment."
"Yes."
"Was that right?"
Lymur was quiet for a second, only smiling. The class waited intensely.
"I thought it was," he said. "I thought he'd done enough harm and the systems in place weren't going to address it and I was capable of addressing it, so I did." He looked at the room. "Whether that was right is exactly the kind of question this course exists to ask. So — " he looked at Finch, "— what do you think?"
Finch had not expected to be turned around on. He sat up slightly. "I think — it concerns me. That someone with your level of power can just decide."
"Why?"
"Because the whole point of systems is that no one person decides."
"And if the systems fail?" Lymur said.
"Then you work to fix the systems. You don't bypass them."
"Even if people are dying while you work to fix the systems?"
Finch opened his mouth. Stopped.
Mira, from the back, said quietly, "That's the proportionality question."
"It is. It's also related to something called a Double Case Effect but that's for another time," Lymur replied. "And it's the same question as the case study." He picked his folder back up. "And maybe also about the Beast Glades, since it's relevant."
He tapped the Dreadclove.
"This flower's here for a reason," he said. "No comfortable answer, yes? You already know it. Let's go."
It was the best lecture of the two weeks. They ran twenty minutes over and he let them, and nobody left.
He walked home that evening in the dark, hands in his pockets.
What a two weeks.
He had a routine. He had an office with Gerald, who was doing better now. He had Aldric, Sera and her mystery pastries on Mondays, a rotating cast of other faculty he was gradually learning. He had forty students, several of whom were already becoming genuinely interesting to him.
He thought about what Cynthia had said on the beach.
Maybe you won't be so lonely anymore.