Chapter 195: Time Flies
The years slipped by in the service to the Alexins faster than he would have thought as Simon lost himself in the pursuits of art, teaching art, and just plain teaching. It was a mixture of experiences, and all of it happened in the beautiful city of Coramin in what felt like the blink of an eye.
At the start, Simon had spent most of his time with Bertrand, but once the older boy found his rhythm in his practice assignments, Simon spent more and more time teaching the younger children to write. Though that started out more tedious than he would have thought, in time, he found it even more enjoyable than art. Over the next few years, he watched them transition from precocious brats to thoughtful adolescents who asked interesting questions about the world around them.
Unfortunately, Simon didn’t know enough about physics to explain why the sky was blue and things like that. He could explain simple things like the evaporation cycle of the ocean and why the rain fell, but for other things and more complex questions, he eventually fell on the idea of answering their questions with questions. This didn’t necessarily produce answers in most cases. It was better than lies, though, and what few books and scrolls he had to teach them with were full of those.
Almost everything was explained away by the gods, and while there were at least little grains of truth sprinkled in some of those myths, by and large, it was just nonsense. Well, at least he thought it was nonsense. He still wasn’t exactly a master of magic yet, and he had no explanation whatsoever for the oracle he’d met so recently, but on the whole, he still tended to think that things worked because of cause and effect and the causes of most things were almost certainly not divine intervention.
If there were Gods floating around this world, wouldn’t I have seen them by now? He wondered one day, after a particularly heated debate about which god made the volcanoes erupt with young Theo and his sister Sophia. That was a stupid question, of course, since he’d literally met a Goddess on more than one occasion. In fact, if he got to level forty, he’d be able to meet her again.
That’s different, though, he argued in his head. Helades is not a Goddess that anyone in this world worships, and I’ve never seen any evidence that the Gods they do worship really exist.
It was a conundrum, but not a particularly important one. People on Earth could make microchips and launch rockets, but they still worshiped gods who didn’t exist. Things didn’t have to make sense to be passed through the ages. Hell, art didn’t make sense, but he’d spent almost a decade now slowly improving at it step by step.
Honestly, until a recent breakthrough, Simon had been starting to sour on it. Not painting and drawing, of course. He still loved that, but having Bertrand tagging along had really been dragging him down. As the years had gone on, Simon had become more and more sure that the young man lacked the talent to really pursue this field.
No, talent is the wrong word, he corrected himself. Drive is more like it.