Gunnland
FTR
Eastern Olmolungring. July 28, 1981.
The new ways hadn't yet come to Mimir Abbey. Perhaps they haven't yet. So Coemgein would have to defend his dissertation to the public, line by line, day after day. Our new archbishop, Zebulon of Karlljon, came from Yungdrunggutsak to preside. Many more men, priests and professors from the Capitollium - our major university, in the capital, is named for its Tiburian founders - came to watch, ask, and critique. I was an acolyte among the Swordbrothers at that time (who were then and are now uninterested in theological disputes) so I was left to usher around the guests of the Abbey. If you have never been to Mimir, and presumably you haven't, it is a massive Gothic place of stone spires and arches and stained-glass windows that look down the mountain upon the glittering lake frozen ten months out of the year. Coemgein had to defend in late July.
Nobody in Olmolungring would agree to be the advocatus diaboli. Coemgein was the most acute theological mind our country had produced, some were saying, since S. A. Gravplass. He had studied with the Dominici in the 1970s, the great humanist scholars of the Université Catholique Pontificale Dominiquaine; even in 1981 not a soul could imagine the Dominci would soon be eclipsed by a growing movement of conservative malcontents. To this day I am not sure Coemgein was prepared for the man they sent up from the Archdiocese of Schwabach, whose cape made him look even taller and thinner, whose cold greyblue eyes looked like they had been carved from the walls of the Abbey.
"Thank you for shewing me in, brother Matteus."
Middelhuis von Haaksbergen laid a black leather briefcase with a subtle Faber-Castell Gruppe imprint on the long table in front of him and snapped it open without looking at Coemgein Beornsson Hart.