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This is: Final Words, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Sunlight enriched air already alive with curiosity, as dawn rose on Brennan and his fellow students in the place to which Jeffreyssai had summoned them.
They sat there and waited, the five, at the top of the great glassy crag that was sometimes called Mount Mirror, and more often simply left unnamed. The high top and peak of the mountain, from which you could see all the lands below and seas beyond.
(Well, not all the lands below, nor seas beyond. So far as anyone knew, there was no place in the world from which all the world was visible; nor, equivalently, any kind of vision that would see through all obstacle-horizons. In the end it was the top only of one particular mountain: there were other peaks, and from their tops you would see other lands below; even though, in the end, it was all a single world.)
"What do you think comes next?" said Hiriwa. Her eyes were bright, and she gazed to the far horizons like a lord.
Taji shrugged, though his own eyes were alive with anticipation. "Jeffreyssai's last lesson doesn't have any obvious sequel that I can think of. In fact, I think we've learned just about everything that I knew the beisutsukai masters know. What's left, then -"
"Are the real secrets," Yin completed the thought.
Hiriwa and Taji and Yin shared a grin, among themselves.
Styrlyn wasn't smiling. Brennan suspected rather strongly that Styrlyn was older than he had admitted.
Brennan wasn't smiling either. He might be young, but he kept high company, and had witnesssed some of what went on behind the curtains of the world. Secrets had their price, always, that was the barrier that made them secrets; and Brennan thought he had a good idea of what this price might be.
There was a cough from behind them, at a moment when they had all happened to be looking in any other direction but that one.
As one, their heads turned.
Jeffreyssai stood there, in a casual robe that looked more like glass than any proper sort of mirrorweave.
Jeffreyssai stood there and looked at them, a strange abiding sorrow in those inscrutable eyes.
"Sen...sei," Taji started, faltering as that bright anticipation stumbled over Jeffreyssai's return look. "What's next?"
"Nothing," Jeffreyssai said abruptly. "You're finished. It's done."
Hiriwa, Taji, and Yin all blinked, a perfect synchronized gesture of shock. Then, before their expressions could turn to outrage and objections -
"Don't," Jeffreyssai said. There was real pain in it. "Believe me, it hurts me more than it hurts you." He might have been looking at them; or at something far away, or long ago. "I don't know exactly what roads may lie before you - but yes, I know that you're not ready. That I'm sending you out unprepared. That everything I taught you is incomplete. I know that what I said is not what you heard. That I left out the one most important thing. That the rhythm at the center of everything is missing and astray. I know that you will harm yourself in the course of trying to use what I taught. So that I, personally, will have shaped, in some fashion unknown to me, the very knife that will cut you..."
"...that's the hell of being a teacher, you see," Jeffreyssai said. Something grim flickered in his expression. "Nonetheless, you're done. Finished, for now. What lies between you and mastery is not another classroom. We are fortunate, or perhaps not fortunate, that the road to power does not wend only through lecture halls. Else the quest would be boring to the bitter end. Still, I cannot teach you; and so it is a moot point whether I would if I could. There is no master here whose art is entirely inherited. Even the beisutsukai have never discovered how to teach certain things; it is possible that such an event has been prohibited. And so you can only arrive at mastery ...
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