He set about the whole thing properly, I have to admit. He wrote it all up, ordered his theses, and announced a great debate. He sent invitations to the other cities and arranged a festival. He debated everybody who came prepared to argue against his points, and when they won on any issue he accepted that and incorporated that into his argument. It’s just that the whole edifice was built on such terrible axioms. At first I had wanted it to be true, wanted the loving Father and Son I had grown up with to be real, as well as Athene. I wanted Jesus to be my savior, as I had believed as a child. But the more closely I looked at what Ikaros was doing, the less sense it made. His axioms were twisted. It was incredibly ingenious, and it all made perfect logical sense, each piece of the structure balanced on each other piece. But it was a castle of straws balanced on air. Athene just wasn’t an angel, and wasn’t perfect. Errors can be refuted, and as his errors were pointed out, by me and by others, he patched them. But his leaps of faith were not errors, and they were inarguable. I tried. Many of us tried. And it was all right as long as it was just a case of what Ikaros believed and tried to persuade people. It was when, after the festival, the Assembly of Amazons voted to make his New Concordance the official religion of the City of Amazons that I knew I had to leave. It would be practiced at festivals. I couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t possibly teach it.

I’d told Klio and Axiothea that I was leaving, and they’d both tried to persuade me to stay. Axiothea was quite happy with the New Concordance. Klio had initially been even less in favor of it than I was, but once she began to study the logic she had been won over by the way Ikaros had integrated Platonic thought all through, and especially with his theory of dynamic ideals, which fit everything she believed. Klio had always disliked Ikaros, but now they began to work together on this project. They spent a lot of time together and became close. She told him about the religions and philosophies she knew about that were unfamiliar to him, and they worked together to reconcile them with everything else.

The New Concordance was generally very popular in the city, though I wasn’t sure how many people even among its adherents really understood it properly.