"In broken mathematics
We estimate our prize"
-Emily Dickinson
Delita's name appears for the first time a year before the Lion War broke out.
Alazlam's handwriting is thin and neat and precise. He'd had a tutor, when he was seven, who had demanded such precision and who hadn't hesitated to give a quick cuff to the head if Alazlam didn't perform to his satisfaction. The man had been gray and humorless. It had been the first time that Alazlam, laced into the milky complacency of childhood, had ever really hated anyone.
His mother had been less than sympathetic - it wasn't easy for a widow to scrape together enough money to educate her son, and Alazlam had better be damn aware of the sacrifices she went through for him. After all, the Lord knew she hadn't been destined for this kind of life. She'd been a lady's maid once, and danced and dined with fine lords once, before Alazlam's birth had taken that all away. Stop being such a sniveling bastard - didn't he see what she had been forced to endure, all because of him? Then she would usually start crying, and Alazlam would wander away, feeling drained and grim.
She made him keep going to the man, and Alazlam could do nothing but endure it silently. He would lie in his bed at night and curl up under his thin sheets and nurse a hard, ugly knot of hatred. He would fantasize of killing the man, of humiliating him, of horrifying him, and then he would fall into a deep, dreamless sleep; a small boy's only victory against the cruel world.
Many soldiers returning from the war had no jobs, little money, and even less loyalty to the crown.
He stops here and absently taps his pen against the inkwell. Truthfully, one can write a hefty volume on the subtle economic factors that threaded their way through the Fifty Year's War and resulted a bleak recession on the other side. One can write several hefty volumes, in fact. Ivalice scholars are currently embroiled in an academic skirmish over whether to accept the established line of reasoning concerning the depression (As is presented in Carlos Avadramo's A True And Detailed History of the Land of Ivalice, where the principal blame falls on the exorbitant taxes levied on the common folk in an attempt to pay the aristocratic war debts, which eventually spiraled out in a general economic whirlpool of poverty and desperation) or to acknowledge the brash new theory (As advanced in The Causes and Effects of the Fifty Year's War, by one Alfred Edinger, who claims that the fighting men were so demoralized and affected by the horrors they had seen during the war that they returned home unwilling to participate in constructive economic opportunity, and instead turned to both unproductive and destructive behaviors). The supporters of the former accuse the latter of engaging in self-indulgent, revisionist psychobabble. The other side insist that the established view is narrow and shallow and ignores the general zeitgeist of the era. During more than one gathering of historians, the conflict has taken the form of outright physical assault.
Truthfully, it would pain Alazlam to mention either theory here. Both philosophies smack of the same typical, tiresome methodology. Historians sit around, measuring grain export rates and bullion levels or tediously pontificating on great, amorphous concepts with no grounding in fact. Nobody seems to care that it does not matter. Certainly it does not matter enough to wage a feud between two different theories. Nobody was interested in the important thing, the provable thing: what had that economic quicksand led to? The pat answer is "The Lion's War", but nobody is interested in exploring that. Everyone just accepts that facet of history, and runs off to argue inconsequential economic trivialities.
So it doesn't matter why there had been an economic downturn - it just matters that there had been one. That is the only point Alazlam cares about, and that would be the only point his intended audience would care about. Surely the historians would scream about the omission, and seek to modify or deny his thesis with drudgingly pointless arguments based on his economic simplifications, but Alazlam finds himself failing to care. Even...looking forward to the anal bastards.
Alazlam realizes that he has formed a fist around his pen, and forces himself to relax and assume the proper form. Surely Mr. Trelane had taught him better than that. Surely he did. Alazlam smiles darkly.
Many became thieves and rebels plotting rebellion against the royal family.
The government would probably have something to say about his work. After all, they had spent much care and effort into indoctrinating the populace so as to believe their "official" history of Ivalice. Something that so dramatically challenged their vision, as his work will, would certainly provoke some sort of reaction. And the Church, of course. The Church would also have something to say about it.
He is looking forward to that as well.
Robbery and murder were commonplace in Ivalice.
The small window behind him is open, allowing the first tentative breezes of autumn to wander in. From the street below come the muted noises of foot traffic and the calls of fishmongers and kettle-wives, colorful ribbons of sounds and profanity emerging from the dull blanket of sound. There would be grimy young pickpockets working the area and giggling girls dressed in red scarves and tall young men lounging around with nonchalant calm.
Below him, Mrs. Ladanam and her daughter Katrina would be serving breakfast to their patrons in a busy, merry common-room. They would leave his breakfast outside his door in accords to a mutual understanding that all three had in regards to disturbing Alazlam while he was working. Sometimes they would go up to find the food still there, long since cold, hours later, and Mrs. Ladanam would cluck about how thin that poor man was. Katrina would merely laugh and bring him up a new plate - she knew he would surface from his work eventually and discover how hungry he was. Surely he was one of their strangest tenants, but not at all a bad egg, and sometimes he told her little stories (on those rare occasions when he would enter the common-room) that were charming and funny.
And if Alazlam had told her of his work, of what he is trying to do with it, she would have merely laughed again.
Many heroes and wizards came out of that era.
Alazlam pauses, again. Reflects. Dips his pen in the inkwell.
Two of note came out of Magic City Gariland.
Author's Note: (6/15/06) Originally Chapter Four of my nerdy FFT: Chorus project. Five years later, I decided it was terrible and completely rewrote it to include more original characters and P. G. Wodehouse pastiches. This is the original chapter.