"Yours for Luria to command": the timeless-love debate and the standing power attributed to her

pivotal · 30 April YDAU

• When: night of 30 April YDAU, the next desert-serial installment (inside the dusk shadow)
• What: The desert dialogue's fullest treatment of what Luria means operationally. Steeply opens with the legend — "They say it's a great and maybe even timeless love, Rod Tine's for your Luria person" — and raises it: "Those around Rod the God say the man would die twice for her. Say he wouldn't have to even think about it." Then he puts her standing power to Marathe as a taunt: the A.F.R.'s scorn for sentiment sits oddly with the fact that "it's just this that has brought you Tine, yours for Luria to command, should it ever come to that." Marathe will not romanticize it: Tine "is attached, fanatically" — attachment as temple-worship, not tragedy — and his whole choose-your-attachments sermon follows from her case. Every layer is hedged as printed: "They say," "Those around Rod the God say," "should it ever come to that" — the command is a conditional the book never shows exercised on Tine. Whether her leverage was ever used, and for whom, stays open.