Candlelight flickered on the stand, casting Rhodesney XVIII's silhouette across the heavy tapestries in the study.
The meeting summary from Northwest Bay in his hands had reached its final page. The densely packed notes had left the edges of the paper slightly curled.
"Through systematic observation and experimentation, establishing a verifiable system of Natural Law..."
The king's fingers lightly brushed over the section defining "science" in the report. The ink gleamed indigo in the candlelight.
The Royal Capital's clock tower sounded the hour outside the window, but he seemed not to hear it.
On the desk, a diagram of Planetary Motion, also circulated from the Lakeheart Town academic conference, lay beneath the Astrological Plate.
The brass plate was etched with the Geocentric Theory orbit passed down by the Church for a thousand years, while the elliptical orbital path on the sketch was like a sharp sword cleaving the ancient star chart in two.
Rhodesney XVIII suddenly remembered his astronomy Mentor's warning from childhood: "Heretical Ideas will burn the fingers of anyone who touches them." Yet what his fingertips touched now was a Lunar Eclipse Prediction Table more precise than the Royal Archives.
"F=ma." When the king recited the simple formula, his throat suddenly tightened. Just three symbols could explain every motion from falling objects to flying arrows, like a key opening the Gate of Truth that had always been locked. One line from the report kept echoing in his mind: "Natural Law does not change because of prayer, nor does it shift because of blasphemy."
"Repeatable verification..." Rhodesney XVIII softly repeated one of the report's key phrases, suddenly realizing that the corners of his mouth had lifted.
That phrase, "repeatable verification," made him think of "repeatable production."
The workers of Northwest Bay needed no mysterious rituals. They could reproduce the