We walked down the hallway. This was my chance to pick his brain. We still had a hidden assassin to deal with.

“What is your opinion of Nycati?”

“Intelligent, eloquent, and well educated,” the First Scholar said. “Alas, not a true philosopher.”

“Why?”

“Nycati shares the same shortcomings as Amphie, although hers are more apparent.”

“I thought she did well.”

The First Scholar shook his head. “She had good teachers. They taught her how to find knowledge and how to retain it, but they failed to ignite the spark of original thought. It is true that familiarizing oneself with the thoughts of those who came before us is the foundation of philosophy, but it is only the first step. The next step is to develop one’s own view. A much more terrifying endeavor.”

“Then Amphie lost?”

“Without a doubt. What question did I ask?”

“What is love?”

The First Scholar nodded. “Exactly. I asked them for their definition of love. Amphie simply announced that love was complex, regurgitated what she was taught about it, and walked us back in a circle to her thesis. She never answered the question.”

“And Lady Wexyn?”

The First Scholar’s eyes lit up. “Such a beautifully concise demonstration of Tessidect’s Principle. He was one of the foundational philosophers that came out of the Omega Centauri Cluster about a thousand years ago. Tessidect proposed that love, in essence, is binding. Whether reciprocated or not, it creates a relationship between a being and the object of their desire, forming its own microcosm. A miniature universe of our own making, subverting all aspects of the time-space continuum. When you are in love, your perception, your inner equilibrium, even your sense of time and place is altered.”

Interesting. I never thought of it that way.

The First Scholar continued, waving his stick as he walked. “Since every being is unique and unlike any other, so too their love and the microcosm it creates are unique. It cannot be defined, but only experienced.”

True. I had been in love before I met Sean, but my relationship with him was unlike any of the others. It was… It was different, and I couldn’t quite put it into words.

“In two short sentences, Lady Wexyn distilled the very essence of this concept: her love cannot be explained, only felt; it is unlike any other; and she prefers it to all prior loves she has experienced. I should have expected nothing less from the disciple of the Temple of Desire. After all, their education is exquisite.”

There was a lot more to Lady Wexyn than she showed to the world, although a certain long-suffering chancellor would likely tell the First Scholar that he was giving her way too much credit.