The Four Revelations of Cinial’jin
You drink of the River and it is clear. You drink of the River and it is foul. You breath of the Sky and it never empties. You weep, and the Sea stings your lips. Rejoice, and mourn, for you belong to this World.
Heaven does not know you.
–Nin’hilarjal, Psalms to Oblivion
The World is a glare when you are helpless.
The Men had bound him, pierced his flesh with nails, but their terror so overmatched their hatred, they were gentle, and so left no memory of their indignity. They shout and laugh. Papa… A walnut tree stands upon the rising pasture beyond them, great with age and solitude, dark with interior shadow. Please, Papa…
Aisralu!
A woman who has outlived her teeth scourges him with thistles. Her arms are frantic with hatred and heartbreak, her knobbed knuckles shake, but her eyes remain slack with incredulity… eyes that were once daring and mercurial, grown stagnant at the bottom of crinkled pockets. For the first time he realizes he has never understood Men, the way they toil against the yoke of dwindling years. The way they do not so much fail as are betrayed.
The Horns rear golden, so high as to hook the woolen sky. The Host of the Nine Mansions groans.
They raise him upon a pole, pile sheaves of bracken about his feet. He has wondered whether death would be beautiful. He has wondered how the end of memory would appear at memory’s end. He has wondered what it means to so outrun glory as to become blind to disgrace. It seems proper that these screeching animals show him.
He watches them tip the amphorae, sees the oil pulse white in the sun. They are all there, Tinnirin, Rama, Par’sigiccas, sheeted in the blood of obscenities, their warcries cracked into gasps of effort, grunts of desperation. As the Men stand milling in the sunlight, filthy, bestial for hair, their brows dark so their eyes seem fires in angry caves. Rama’s head tips back like a bust on an unbalanced pedestal, painting witless shoulders in blood, as a plummeting shadow blots him, an Inchoroi monstrosity, decked in the corpse of some luckier brother. And he sorts them with his gaze, his frail captors, glimpsing dog-teeth, gloating for all the faces he will remember, for shame if not for torment. As Quya Chariots soar like polished stones cast against the sky. Rama! Rama! And a torch is brought forth, little more than a smoking blur in the open sunlight; a wave of exclamation peaks in a raw little cheer. As Ciogli makes a bastion of the Father of Dragons, his shouts ringing from his cauldron helm, Bashrag slumping from the arc of his hammer. A sobbing boy-child takes the torch. He and his brothers cry, Lord Mountain! Bullied forward, he turns to him, sobbing, the torch held like a poisonous snake. The Horns rise as golden haze through pitched skies, distant Quya drifting like sparks from the evening fire, dragons like twirling soot, making deep a World crabbed with violence. So like his dead sister in the dove-breasted beauty of his cheek (though she had hated fear more). Great Ciogli teeters, and the hacking floor drops into watery insignificance….
“Papa hates that he is my image,” she says, laughing, squinting as if about to sneeze at the sunlight.
How could… How could…
Great Ciogli teeters, his head turning as if to catch some uncommon sound from a drowse, and they see it: the lone arrow pricking from the slot of his helm. The boy is thrust forward, a push like a blow, so that his stride is caught on a thrown shoulder, and he stumbles, flinches from kissing the unseen flame. “No.” A flicker hooks his gaze, and out of the thousand pockets of tumult, he is cursed with seeing… seeing… The same mouth slung about indecision, the same tipping look (though she hated fear more). Nin’janjin leaps crisp from the tumult, his spear poised high, his shield a burnished coin. The boy grimaces, cries out to the rag-garbed women–
What is your name?
She crinkles her nose. “Are you dying?”
Can a moment be caught? clapped like fly in the palm of the heart that needed it, a memory, painting deep the illumination of life. Can a moment be caught by a moment? a heart within a heart within a heart, versions receding, a pit that sound the very fathom of oblivion, life drawn into a spear. And he realizes he has never understood Men, not even when he loved them. Cu’jara Cinmoi turns into the nimil point, cramps about the rod of ash, so that he crouches, every bit as crisp, his hands hooked, sinking to his knees on the chest of the Host of Nine Mansions. His chin against his breast, the boy lowers the torch like something that might break of its own weight. The Copper Tree of Siol staggers, then falls. He lets it slip into the heaped bracken, the boy. He runs intent, shield raised against raining pots of fire, sprinting from the roar of barking massacre behind him into dismay. Dead! And the flames take shallow root, spinning outward across the oil-soaked regions, smokeless lines which beget incendiary blooms, until all the fuel heaped about his bound feet is skinned in frantic orange and gold, the fire sinking in, sparking deeper and deeper, unlocking curlicues of smoke, threads that become ribbons that become streaming plumes, hanging like ink, misting like fog, raising a shroud across the hollow sky, smearing the sun into a blinding stain. Our Beloved King is dead! And a cool falls across his scalp and shoulders, the gift of rolling fronds of smoke-shadow, even as the heat begins chewing his feet, biting and biting with dog’s teeth. Fire is the youngest thing, the most ancient. They draw up his youngest, sweet Enpiralas, on an Inchoroi shield, his face flattened where the skull was missing. He rolls his gaze across the world, peers through the hazy screens, to the huddled knots of Men, and sees the demented grins of mortals inflicting their horror of death upon another, hands outstretched in wild gesture, fists beating his image, and the horsemen in gleaming cuirasses beyond, banners tipping as they yank short their galloping rush. And she grows still in his arms, Aisarinqu, at once kindling light, and a stone, such a heavy stone, and he weeps for holding her so punishing is her weight, his life unwinding for her density, the gravity of her stationary heart, her mouth hung about emptiness. He shrieks for the finality, for the relief, the sobbing knowledge that her suffering has ended, that he cradles oblivion in his arms. He begins choking, coughing up the convulsions that wrack his bound flesh, flap him like a blanket, for the fire was upon him, and he could see it, laving the white lines of his feet, the searing, the blistering, the charring–his feet, which had been with him since… since… now writhing and kicking of their own volition, and he throws his eyes skyward and he screams and he laughs, knowing that this… this he would remember, that his burning would not pass through him, would not fall away into the black-of-black, but would dwell forever as another horror, so welding him to who he had been. The boy throws his hands to his eyes, only to have his father wrench them aside, shake him, point at the place that shrieks, writhes, burns. And he stands in the blackness, the eternal dank that rules the guttural foundations of Siol, his hand upon the neck and shoulder of his daughter, Aisralu, who even now clutches her belly, her womb, groaning against her headstrong pride, whispering, Please… Father… Please… You… Must… again and again, searching for his eyes, her face a summit, a beauty he worships, bent into a pageant of strangers by anguish. He screams and he laughs and through smoke and undulating air he sees worry unbalance the beasts that caper about his perimeter. Aisarinqu screams and Aisarinqu screams, again and again, not so much words as a storm of occasions, her delicate face crushed into instants and flayed across an age, for theirs had not been a happy union. And it seems he should be a thing of wax, that the roaring phosphor should melt and consume him, not cook. That is the sole curse of the Ishroi, she hisses. He is sack, a net bound about furious, ice-cold fish, each part of him thrashing, fleeing, and he howls realizing, for the first time in ten thousand years comprehending, that he is a thing of meat, that he is of the self-same flesh, the very thing that nourishes him, boar-squealing, bloody and alive. To only hope they had fathered their sons! His eyes are pinched and pricked by the effluence of the encircling furnace–no longer his own. The blackness falls away from her sagging face, and for an instant he gazes upon her, beloved Aisarinqu. A second, shrieking revelation. The white spark of some faraway light refracts in her tears, so that her contrition seems holy, and his embittered and profane. Fire is a thing that eats. A wondering instant, before the wrath seizes his fists anew.
He slumps into his corporeal anguish; burning seems… proper.
A wind laves him, drawn in from the smoke-wreathed world, the radial distances, and blown upward through glittering rags of flame. He understands he is the base of an invisible pillar, a roiling column of heat, fluted and fanning into the shrouded sky, and he wonders whether a falcon might ride the updraft, the heat of his burning. The fish are warm now–sluggish. He glimpses armoured Men raising scabbarded swords, dropping them like clubs.
Please… Father…
Aisralu!
A glimpse of water, like a silver coin wobbling beneath the lip of an upraised pail, and it seems the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, a trophy scalped from the very sun. The little human girl, the one who found him where he cannot remember, the girl who was whipped by her father for stealing food out of pity, who sings songs in her queer, manling language, laughing for the way the stream tickles her feet, her face purpling above his grip, kicking and flailing like a woodland beast, as he sobs and explains to her, professing his love, his adoration. I must… I must remember. Even before the coming of the Flesh Angels, the Inchoroi, they live lives long enough for children to become strangers. The torment has been a peculiar, more like a casting of liquid than a form of retribution. He ponders the way life bloats upon the threshold of dying.
Thinks it proper.
What is this hunger? Lights diminish, sputtering before kicked into smoke by shadows. What is this need to strike meaning into the heart of stones? A different kind of nudity, chill and wet and horrifically amphibian. This blindness to surface–what is it? Voices. Something too absurd to be agony. His limbs vague and distant, twitches sensed only at the sockets. Hazy black bubbles clot the sky. Heaven tipping. Something… his body… jerking–shivering. Darkness, a shadow looming out from every corner of his vision, bricking him in. A Man leans over him, elbows out, hands on his thighs, and he sees a face that could belong to a brother, such is its beauty–and eyes that see only a blessed reprieve from boredom. “You smell of lamb…” he says, bent across the spiking corona of the sun. Parasols of smoke float behind his head, drifted…
“My kind cooks like pig.”
And he is not dead.
He lies unbound, sprawled naked beneath the sprawling canopy of a tree. Everything tingles, and he understands he has been stripped of his skin, or a good part of it. He experiences another revelation, that agony is the root, the very truth of sensation, for the blades of the grasses had become knives, and the clicking legs of the spider had become needles, and the wind burns with a perpetual fire. They stand there, at the blackest heart of their dying Mansion, the deepest, the mountain above and about them groaning with the chorus of ten thousand lamentations–all the heart-cracking losses. “I confess, I did not believe it.” There they stand, the famed father and the cherished daughter, their names no longer remembered, their sandalled feet upon the abyssal lip, so that emptiness yawns like a slow waking dragon. A single Man sits beside him, clotted with shining insignia he has never seen before, saying, “They claim you killed a man’s daughter.” And it sickens him, the obscenity of the vision, the faces of his brothers–his race!–nailed like pelts to the abominations that loped across the scourged plains, pale save for the clotting of blood and excrement, screaming like girlish beasts, their members curved across their abdomens, running, shrieking. The Man’s black hair trembles in the breeze, as fine as hummingbird feathers. An old yearning comes upon him–or the memory of one–his Ishroi brothers wading into the mobs of Halaroi, starved mothers clutching starved babes. “No matter…” the Man says. “One must be criminal to commit a crime.” He witnesses the magic that is brutality, the way cries become piteous silence and a jerking mandala of crimson. “One must be something small…” A cold look of satisfaction. “And you, my False friend, smack of immensity.”
His cousin, Pil’kmiras, curls like a dog on the dust, coughing about some unseen catastrophe. Show me! Where?
The Man’s gaze searches the encircling World, squints for the glare. “We are alike in this regard.” He raises a thumb to pick at his teeth. “When I was a child, my grandmother would raise me on her knee and tell me that I was indistinguishable from justice.” He snorts. “‘The Gods,’ she would drawl–Grandmother split her passion between drinking and oblivion, you see. ‘The Gods say that the goodness of our acts, my darling dear, resides in our rank. Do you know what this means, hmm?’ She always liked to lean her forehead against mine. ‘It means you cannot sin against your lessersssss!’” The Man breaks into a winning grin, one that should be remembered for it’s resemblance to vertigo. “Can you believe it? What grandmother says such things to a child?” The Wracu fall like barks of iron upon them. Bodies stick-whipping. Geysers of brilliance crossing like swords. “She’s mad, my grandmother… Mad with cunning.” Yes… This was what they suffered, the ones they dragged clear the fiery vomit, the way shrieking had delivered them to someplace calm, where they could swallow without taste. “Is beauty a sign, do you know?” the Man asks. “A mark of who defines justice? These are the kinds of questions I need to ask you…” Skafra uncoils his shining bulk and reveals Par’sigiccas, half of him white flesh, half of him black charcoal. What grieves thee, Son of Siol? “I used to think my grandmother was wise because she was old. Now I think she is simply… savage, I guess. Savage with fear…” The Man pauses to work his jaw about an involuntary snarl. “But you… You have seen things… times… You have witnessed what Men can scarce dream, let alone imagine!” All great things, the saurian maw croaks, are round, Cinial’jin. “Enough to rot you from the inside, they say… Like a melon.” Par’sigiccas gazes with one eye from a half-husked skull. “You see, I look at you, and I see…” A sly, mortal wink. ”Me.”
The Wracu seems skinned in flame. Someday thou shalt tip over the edge of thine world.
“This is why I saved you… You are my map. My chart.” Cu’jara Cinmoi leaps upon the altar, gloating, displaying the mad extent of his arrogance, openly, outrageously, knowing that his own would celebrate his impiety as strength, and that his enemies would cry out for heartbreak and fury. “I’m curious…” He smiles in the sad way of mothers seeing mediocrity in their children. “Do you feel it? Or is it a thoughtless assumption, the fact that Men shrink in your presence?” There is a breath that belongs to the first glimpse of madness in some beloved soul, a hook and a pang, a consciousness of the tunnels that branch into caverns within you–a place where breath should be. What Siöl requests Siöl compels! The C n is a code of tyrants. When I stretch forth my hand, you shall be its shadow. “What is the sensation of immortality? I’m sure I… know it… But without any to-to compare…” The Man leans over him, his knife unnatural for its gleaming proximity to his face, something monolithic tapering to a shining prick, the point where earthly edges intersect, then cross over into death.
The humour was peeled from his eyes, revealing the dead dark look beneath. “I fear that I require that you speak.”
Cu’jara Cinmoi’s glare somehow slips the uproar and picks him from the confusion. Yes. You know.
Is he shaking?
He dandles the knife with the mock clumsiness of an elder brother teasing a younger. “You must have something to tell me. Surely the Whore delivered you for a reason.” And they approach the northern entrance, the Way of Upright Kings, where the peach trees forever bloom out of season, finding naught but a great black rope of smoke hanging heavenward from the Mansion’s shattered maw, inking the clouds. “Shh… Shh… Just tell me…” The knife pricks across his cheek. “Tell me…” And Lord Mountain turns as if from between worries, and they see it, the black shaft jutting from their hearts. And he watches, his spirit cringing, flinching, warding, even though he cannot move; the point’s lazy swing, the hanging heartbeat above his pupil, then the drop, as though everything seen were the skin of a grape. Someone grimaces and screams. How does one love in such times? Aisarinqu whispers, cupping his head against her, so that his tears make a cheek of her breast. A laugh with the reed timbre of mortality. His face clenched as if about some splintered outrage. A mouth hung about emptiness. Something. Something in the meat. And it dawns that he does not comprehend these beasts.
A man reclines in the grasses that wreath his head, stares down at him with uncommon familiarity. And he just… pushes… her… Aisralu… A motion too banal to be anything but murderous and insane, opening a door, perhaps, or closing one, and he feels it, the kiss of skin forming to skin, the hand of the father across the nape of the daughter, the cherished daughter; a push and nothing more, an effort slight enough to slip the nets of awareness, to be no effort at all, and still, miraculously, impossibly, violent with excess, savage, a crime unlike any other; the bare palm against the nape of her neck, her shoulders hunched about a ravaged womb, his arm extending, the gentle insistence of nudging a younger brother toward a maid, and an entire life tipping, a cherished life, an engulfing presence, tipping, how? how? the push floating into slipping, plummet… The wind barges through the walnut tree, a groaning susurrus. Tipping, the beloved voice crimped high, a kicking intake of breath, a sound that should strike sparks. No… And a life slips into the abyss, dropping like water, lines sprawling across the plummet, shrinking into something small enough to swallowed… Shrieking. No…
“You make me… curious…”
A man dangles from the glare of blood and sun. There is even envy in his gaze.
Please, Papa…
A final revelation. Sunlight cracking through spanning limbs. The whole mountain wheezes for the weeping of thousands, the wreckage of… The breeze burning, eating. The world tipping.
No.
A bare palm against a cherished back–
So, what is the daughter asking for? Does she want him to save her or kill her? Is she dying of the Womb Plague?
Pretty important battle with Cujara Cinmoi and Ciogli both dying, Sil killing Quya mages with his Heron Spear, Wutteat having been killed ( yet we see him in WLW).
I have no educated guesses as to who the Nonman is, who his wife would be, or who the male leader at the end is. Maybe I cannot know based on the info I have.
Anyways, cool piece. Very vaguely and mysteriously described, but also very engaging.
Mith! I’m glad you popped in. ‘Context baiting’ is pretty much what this piece is all about. Fragments that will or will not reward readers depending on their intimacy with the books. I’m actually very interested in the kinds of interpretations people come up with on their own: helps me gauge that all important line between intriguing and frustrating…
That said, I think if you do a careful reread of the Wutteat section in WLW you’ll find the answer to that particular riddle.
Hi Scott,
I’ve only read “The Prince of Nothing” (I’ve also read “Neuropath” actually) and I’m currently waiting for the other 4 books (they supposedly are lost somewhere between the two Atlantic shores). Can I read safely this tale without spoiling anything in the books?
Most definitely.
Yes, the first Atrocity Tale…seems to me the Non-Man can only remember through suffering but his recollection treats all the past as occurring simultaneously.
Will have to compare this with Cleric’s ideas about Becoming.
My brief impressions.
A mercy killing leaves a bitter scar that binds the fragments of this nonman’s memory.
Conphas can almost feel the emotion from the dying nonman and provides a counterpoint with his short, emotionless and focused life.
The ignorance of the manner in which he bestows euthanasia to the nonman in turn provides some biting irony.
“The Horns towered high, gold-gleaming while all the World’s glory thrashed and screamed below, nimil-clad Ishroi sheeted in the blood of obscenities, Totems tipping, caterwauling Sranc–and the cry, the throttling fact, resounding: …” needs some editing. Also I think there might be a confused hononym near the end “There feet on the edge..” or something.
Thanks, Curethan. That sentence breaks pretty much every damn rule of thumb I discussed in my creative writing class… I’ll have to think about it!
Well, I know what I will be doing during my lunch break today.
“carcass of Wutteat” *intriguing*
Wutteat’s carcass has to do with his mechanical nature, does it not?
He’s been killed quite a bit.
The pieces are there…
Fine line between intriguing and frustrating…..In the south we call that riding the fence….WELL DONE………..IF i remember right..Wutteat can not die untill the end of the world or 133,sand souls left? ……..Uncle?…………AND totally unrelated who the f is the twin talking too?? MADNESS…..breeds…MADNESS
There’s an aphorism buried in here somewhere….
Normally stream of consciousness frustrates me, but when it’s coming from a nonman and leaping across time, well that was the perfect stylistic choice to convey their frame of mind. Love the references though I’m sure I only caught some. I actually thought this worked better than the WLW sections but that may be because I feel I have a better grasp of the nonmen in general.
Style all comes down to motivation. For some, there’s no motivating something like this.
Nonmen stuff is fascinating. Without spoiling future books, do you have any pieces on the nature of the Outside/souls? Specifically, whether the Inchoroi have souls (they seem to have mastered sorcery and fear the Outside so must have?). I was also confused how Wutteat, a product of the Tekne, came to be in his current state in WLW as Sranc/Bashrag/Skinspies appear to have no souls. I would therefore assume they can’t pass to the Outside/be damned. Wutteat’s status in WLW would indicate that Dragons do/can?
Basically, anything that fleshes out the metaphysics without spoiling anything! 🙂
I have a short story call “The False Sun” that I’ve been sitting on for months now.
Please, by all means, let us provide you with some feedback on that too! 😉
You wonder why Erratics are so dangerous – this fully explains why.
Also, Wutteat can’t die; not while the world still lives.
Yes, Wutteat wants the world ‘closed’ like his Inchoroi creators, but to me that doesn’t explain ‘undeath’ which represents a round-trip to the Outside, and unless I’m mistaken, a soul? Basically, he already is dead, just half in the Outside, half not… (not dead enough!)
Wutteat is not a creation of the Tekne, at some point in their adventures in space, the Inchoroi picked him up, and then used him to make dragons later on. So he has a soul, whether the other dragons do, we don’t know. The Inchoroi do have souls, it’s the whole reason they want to seal shut the world.
I assumed that in Eärwa, men, Nonmen and Inchoroi all have souls, as a soul is required to perceive the ontus, work sorcery and be damned. Aurang can clearly work sorcery.
I think that having a soul also implies, at some level, a relationship with the God (whole/part?), although I don’t know why Nonmen appear to be damned regardless… maybe specific agencies of the Outside hunger/are hungers for specific races and all Nonmen ‘gods’ are dead? This defaults them to limbo/oblivion/eternal torture by any agency of the Outside?
Anyway, I digress. Where was it revealed that Wutteat was ‘picked up’ on the Inchoroi’s space adventures rather than created by the Tekne? That would account for him seeming to have a soul, and he says himself that he came on the Ark. However, everything I remember reading suggested that Wracu were one of the weapon races. Is the ‘father of dragons’ the one exception?
We don’t really understand damnation as yet. Damnation/Sin is objective in the setting’s universe, but the Tusk isn’t necessarily correct what sins damn. The Tusk’s condemnation of the Nonmen was written by the Inchoroi after all.
The Gods and the God don’t even have anything to do with sin. Sin is a function of the Universe. But, if you kiss enough ass, a God can prevent you from being eaten by a Ciphrang or falling into oblivion, like tagging yourself with some kind of fluorescent-marker. The fact that Nonmen don’t worship the Hundred doesn’t help.
I don’t have a copy of my WLW on me atm. But, Wutteat was around long before the dragons. Sil rode Wutteat out of the ark. The first dragons weren’t created until after Sil’s death. Wutteat is the template for dragons.
My own understanding of the Outside is as follows (I haven’t read the books since WLW so my recollection could be slightly off the mark):
It is mentioned frequently that a Topos is an location where the Outside leaks into ‘reality’, the Outside itself seeming to be spheres of alternate ‘reality’ in which the desires of powerful agencies (gods, demons/ciphrang) mould their own sphere of reality according to their desires/hungers. I personally believe the Fanim; the gods are simply greater demons. Maybe they are formed from the coalesced emotions emanating nearer to ‘reality’ (explaining why they, like men, are simply shattered aspects of the God they represent – fertility, war, pestilence, the hunt, etc). Of course I could simply be cross-pollinating ideas from ‘Chaotic’ entities in other fantasy settings! 😉
Would you really want your soul to be ‘saved’ by Yatwer? Comparing that to being tormented by a random Ciphrang and I’m not sure there’s necessarily a difference… (perhaps the ‘gods’ are more efficient at soul ‘plucking’ and therefore eternity doesn’t hurt so much?)
I wouldn’t be surprised if Kelhus himself gains actual apotheosis sooner rather than later (if he hasn’t already). After all he is the ‘Aspect-Emperor’, ‘reality’ already bends to his will (through sorcerous and mundane action), he has travelled to the Outside and returned, and is feared by powerful agencies of the Outside (as a rival?)
Your comment about Wutteat makes sense, he is the template for dragons (rather than an actual dragon), as the Nonmen are the template for Sranc…
This line intrigued me:
“The Tusk’s condemnation of the Nonmen was written by the Inchoroi after all.”
Where does it say that the Inchoroi had anything to do with the Tusk?
I really liked the short story. It raises interesting questions..The memories of the Non-man point to a very different account of the battle described in the appendix of the Thousand Fold Thought, wherein Sil is killed by Cu’jara Cinmoi who takes the Heron spear, who dies later in another battle, according to the appendix. What explains this divergence in accounts? The most likely to my mind, is the faulty memory of the non-man in this story, who has collapsed his memories of two battles into one, but perhaps this is too straight-forward…
A question for Scott, I was struck reading the White Luck Warrior that Kellhus in his discussion with the non-man emissary called for revenge for the death of their daughters and wives, but said this happened three thousand years ago…by my understanding the womb plague must have occurred thousand of years before. Now is Kellhus using this discourse to determine the extent of the non-man lose of memory, or is it more simply explained as a mistake by the author?
Kellhus says four thousand years. But it’s still a continuity error. An obvious, bone-headed one at that. It should be five.
Tusk and Inchoroi can be found here:
http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2011/07/r-scott-bakker-interview-part-2.html
But yeah, there’s no indication that Gods are actually capable of forgiving sins. They just snatch you up if they like you. Whether their heavens are as nice as they like to claim is another thing. Sin is like radioactivity. More sin you commit your sin-scale reads higher and higher. This attracts Ciphrang, like odor I suppose? If you pledge yourself to a god, they’ll grab you and prevent you from being tortured by Ciphrang. People who are sorta neutral just fall into oblivion.
I don’t think it’s clear yet what happens to people who commit good deeds/are good, and aren’t pledged to one of the Hundred. These are the sort of folks that the Fanim claim would be taken up by The God. Or maybe they get tortured by the angelic ciphrang that Mr. Bakker was talking about, lol.
Wow. Thanks for the link. I didn’t know that some of this stuff had actual answers! Are there any other links to Eärwa background that I might have missed?
I don’t think it’s clear yet what happens to people who commit good deeds
I wonder if the whole ‘good’ actions thing is a roundabout way of describing the mayhap madness of clinging to an idea of good that goes utterly not just against common opinion, but the very physical movement and strata of the universe?
I mean, they aren’t good deeds – they are good relative to some grand structures opinion. And yet the structure swollows everything in it’s movements, so mayhap madness in thinking it anything else but ‘good’…
NIce piece. A lot to digest here, amid the tragedy of the womb-plague and the ishroi war of extinction against the inchoroi.
I was trying to conjure an opposition between the sordid stakes of the Mannish present and the epic stakes of the Nonman past. This kind of apportioning of atrocity, the idea that tragedy is itself ranked across some kind of authority gradient, is very, very strange. Very human.
I think I was confused by the ‘no’s at the end – is that actually Cinial’jin crying that out, not Aisralu? I got a sense from the headstrong pride it was as she wished, but the ‘no’ confused me as to whom wanted what, at the end.
No.
Confused, because that could be quite a funny answer. If it’s Aisralu crying it out, apart from perhaps illustrating an animal reflex (even in the mighty nonmen) to cry out no even though she requested it, what’s going on doesn’t land in my net.
It’s the last thing her father hears.
I wonder if you got amnesia and then read this, whether you’d be left in the same place as me? Or maybe, like some just get cryptic crosswords, it’d still click for you? He seemed to desperately care about his daughter. I have a vague theory about deciding death instead of waiting for it to creep up and take, but after that, can’t fathom this. I mean, I’m fine with it being left up in the air if that’s part of the idea, I’ll set it amongst the rest of my question marks.
“I don’t think it’s clear yet what happens to people who commit good deeds”
This universe probably has an inverted version of privatio boni.
There is nothing good, just the absence of evil.
Remind me of this final line in the near future, Jorge. Amazing case of synchronicity!
I have no idea what was going on here.
Okay, yes, it became clear that it was three or four different periods of time all mashed together, but this wasn’t immediately obvious.
Obviously some readers really enjoyed it as a tantalising puzzle box. I didn’t. There’s some interesting stuff in here, but as written, it was nearly impossible to pick apart the different threads and make any kind of sense of them. A lot of it just reads like non sequitur sentences strung together. Especially in the first half of the story, before any of them have built up a context. And even in the second half, I still wasn’t 100% on just how many different threads there were.
Was this supposed to be a story of massive import to the history of Earwa? Or just a character piece about the insanity of an Erratic? Or both? I couldn’t tell, so it wound up being neither.
It feels like a rough draft of something that could be quite good once its been tightened up and made clearer.
I think you’re far from alone in your reaction, Sam – just a minority here. This is what makes your reading so valuable for me.
Getting inside the head of an Erratic was a big part of the motive. As I mentioned earlier, another part of the idea was to contrast the varieties of the sordid/human (via the burning and Conphas) versus the epic/Nonman (via C’s memories of trauma). The problem is that the lack of clarity is the creative point, which is well and fine for readers who have a taste for that thing, and frustrating as all hell for readers who do not. Thus you find it here!
I’m just glad you were interested enough to follow the world outside the boundaries of your taste.
I have developed a love-hate relationship with your books since I started reading them a couple of years ago. On the one hand, I really like the narrative and the world you’ve created, and I think you’ve injected some of the most awesome ideas I’ve seen in fantasy into the books. On the other, I have a whole lot of problems with the way it is presented. It makes posting comments to your blog feel a lot like trolling, when in fact I’m genuinely interested in discussion.
For this particular piece, I’m not sure the stream of consciousness is effective at getting the point across. Unless the whole point was the stream of consciousness. Otherwise, there are other ways to get the “unstuck in time” message across while maintaining reader clarity. Slaughterhouse 5 does it. Chapter 4 of Watchmen does it really well too. I know the situation with the Erratic isn’t the same as that of Billy Pilgrim or Dr Manhattan, but it seems to me that it effectively is, insofar as writing it is concerned.
You find lyricism frustrating. Other’s find its absence deadening. The point of the series is two walk a fine line between the two: it’s one of the things that makes it unique, and almost narcotic for readers who click with this sensibility.
The point of this story is to experiment, and in a manner to see how much I can get away with. Erratics suffer a profound confusion, one which I wanted the reader to experience in some measure rather than simply observe. This is a literary tactic, though, something imported from a different genre, born of different expectations and so bound to cross wires.
The real interesting thing to me is that you and so many others are so much more tolerant of ‘genre-bending’ than literary readers seem to be. I actually thought about sending this to some literary journals, until I found, over and over again, ‘We do not accept works of science fiction or fantasy.’ Just those two.
I’m definitely in the camp that finds a lack of lyricism deadening. Your lyricism is one of the things that really drew me into your writing. I can remember the moment when it really struck me. The exact wording escapes me, but it was in the first section of TDTCB when Kellhuss encounters the nonman and crosses swords with him, and mentally thinks that the “space between his strokes was there, as it had been with the Sranc, but it was much narrower.” Or something to that effect. You then describes how he “climbed up into that space,” and then the nonman’s strokes begin falling further and further off the mark until Kellhus finally draws blood. That particular bit really fascinated me, and my mental imagery of the action was so much more vivid for it.
On the other hand, I got my office mate to read the series, and while he enjoys it, it’s not to the degree that I do, and one of his complaints is a wish that your lyricism was sometimes just get out of the way of the action.
It’s interesting because for something that permeates your writing quite a bit, I’ve noticed you don’t often seem to bring it up in posts or in discussions here.
I’ve wondered about that myself. I think there’s a bunch of issues pertaining to my fantasy work more specifically that I simply burned through several years ago. I had just moved on by time I started the blog.
Lyricism or no lyricism, keep plaguing those office mates!
Happy ents broadway version aught to have a link here.
Fucking AWESOME! Too… too… funny.
I gotta watch reading stuff like this though. I find my mindset becomes baroque, and that’s the last thing I want to happen to this series.
Sorry man!
I found that this piece required two reads to be able to latch on, something i wouldn’t do in a book. That said, I felt the piece became fairly clear on the second reading, and it is almost just a case of formatting the paragraphs differently.
The piece did raise completely new concepts behind the motivation and effects of erratic’s actions, which hasn’t been forewarned in the series, but I nonetheless really enjoyed the switch, and actually found the erratics to be more understandable, less abstract in motivation, after this piece,
There’s all kinds of stuff in TUC that I’m hoping this will inform. It’ll be interesting to see.
The way Cleric appeared in the books I’d imagine an Erratic’s perception as if enclosed by blackness. His perception might be sound but lost without the context of experience. His memory would be focused on few specific details, events and feelings that stick out because the pain involved was extraordinary.
However, from this stream of consciousness one can easily get the idea that an Erratic is just someone who has no sense of time and an emotional spectrum where pain is the only trace of love. The latter might be true of a Nonman but I thought the author would like to show more than the epic flashbacks of an immortal who seems to have been bashed on the head. A similar result as combining two bottles of whiskey with a LOTR marathon.
In terms of creativity and experimentation, I found the passages about the WLW in the book very clear and sensible and enjoyed them very much.
By the way, I did not get the impression at all that there was a mercy killing involved, as a reader above suggested.
ps.Which pronoun or article is missing here: “The Man called… what was name” ?
Thanks B. Pain as the shadow of love is almost exactly the formulation I use. The missing article is noted, and appreciated!
I read it, as his daughter asking him to kill her.
Before the agony of the womb plague increases.
He does not oblige her however, and is with her through her agonizing death.
Great teaser for us, and much appreciated.
I have never looked forward to a release as much as i am the UHC.
So who’s being pushed off the cliff? And by whom?
Aisralu gets pushed off a cliff Cinial’jin. Borric is definitely wrong, he does oblige his daughter, but the entire event is traumatic (which is why….HE….REMEMBERS).
That’s what I figured! Well, the killing of the poor human girl is why he’s remembering his daughter right now.
I’m now wondering if the harsh words of his wife are just what fragment of her he can remember, because they were harsh words?
Or he didn’t kill his daughter and kills the human girl because of the memories of his daughter’s pleadings mixed with the now of the human and he killed a girl he sort-of thought was his daughter because she asked him to and it might silence the pleadings to kill her like she’s asking.
So, some careful deliberations. Between Cinialjin hating that his daughter looks just like him and his Nonman wife’s wayward desire, it seems likely that she is not his daughter. Based on the fact that we then hear the wife say that the sole curse of the Ishroi is that they can only hope they father their sons, I am lead to believe that Nonmen women could still get pregnant by human men, but no longer by males of their own species.
Still can’t figure out the details of the Womb Plague from all of this.
Confused by the stuff Sakfra has to say.
So Cujara Cinmoi is being impious and arrogant because he has achieved immortality. Impious how exactly, I wonder.
This revised draft has some great one-liners btw. Ciogli “making summit” of Wutteat, his “cauldron-helm”..
Also, stream-of-consciousness works really well here, I have to say. Really pulls you in.
Finally, I’m going to guess and say that:
“What Siöl requests Siöl compels! The C n is a code of tyrants! ”
C n is perhaps a reference to Cincûlic, which we know is the Nonman name for the Inchoroi tongue. There is a tie the Inchoroi because this quote refers to Cujara’s immortality, gained via the Inchoroi. Describing their language as “code” also works.
“Quya Chariots soared like polished stones cast against the sky. Rama! Rama!”
Rama – A deliberate choice? I don’t know the full width and breadth of Hinduism, though I do recall flying chariots as well in the televised version.
“He watch them pour the oil from amphorae, see it pulse white in the sun.”
Not sure about the tenses here. Shouldn’t “watch” be “watched” and “see” be “saw”?
“that he wis a thing of meat”
Not sure if someone else corrected for this, but “wis” I think should be “was”.
“Reptilian passion bloomed across its crest, so the Wracu seemed skinned in flame. Thou shalt tip over the edge of thine world.”
My understanding here is that Skafra (who I thought was jet-scaled?) is flushed with redness at the excitement of slaughter, but I think the challenge is the dragon-fire association (I know the spit molten lava in the books.) As such, “skinned in flame” feels confusing to me, as I don’t actually know what those words mean in reference to a change of scale-color resulting from “reptilian passion”.
Might just be me.
It is interesting that perhaps, born of Wutteat, the dragons don’t possess the erotic needs of the Sranc and Skin-Spies.
This is awesome. The story is in the hoist as I type. Thanks Sci.
Appreciate the juxtapositioning? of the wracu with Conphas, works well.
I’m actually still on the fence with that bit… Pacing maybe?
In the light of your latest update regarding being on the bubble:
Do you want to be lyrical or successful?
Both those who we’re thrilled by this and those who felt its lyricism obfuscated its intent are united in the tacit understanding that whatever it’s merits, this writing will not earn you the financial success you are looking for. It’s appeal is too narrow.
Tell the story, show us an erratic and visions of the past in your post-modern view of a deranged non-human mind. But contrast it, give us the perspective of a non-erratic articulating the same events, or are these creatures an entire race of madmen who are more literary construct than plausible entities? A people who, to a Norman, are so mentally weak that like the Inchorai they are completely undone? A species who are the blundering temporally dispossessed, cognitively dissonant super-powerful yet effectively mentally incontinent fools?
Damn I thought the Inchorai were pathetic. That race had a horde general, who supposedly is the near last of his kind, fighting an eon length war for their very souls. A war that has caused his species to cross the stars and all the thing can do is obsessing masterbate when it encounters kellhus and takes the form of Esmenet. Wheres the focus? The drive? The mental acuity? “We have met the enemy, and they are a pubescent early teenage male”. Talk about your fuck-ups pun intended.
In general, and as response to this work and all your others. Articulate truths and your lies. Don’t cultivate misunderstanding like an oracle at Delphi.
Or accept the small market such habits condemns you too. I urge you that there is room for both, in the same story. Broad appeal and literary flourish.
That’s the tightrope, isn’t it? The problem now is that I’m halfway through: making popular concessions will only be a betrayal at this point, as well as useless, since all the sorting is pretty much done. At this point, I think anyway, the best thing to do is to execute the original vision as skilfully as possible, and trust that the reputation of the series will be enough for people to accommodate the literary conceits – as it has for so many people already.
The point you bring up about the Inchies is a good one: the question is whether it’s an oversight or a clue. There’s ancient, and then there’s old.
“There’s ancient, and then there’s old.” You Delphi-ed me Bakker. Touche.
TTT SPOILER
I kinda think that was the point with Aurang, and it did show why despite their power they failed to win so many times. But it is also important to note that he took over the form that would (or so he thought) delay Kellhus the longest so his skin-spy could kill Akka.
(Plus, when Esmi says “Then how does any desire belong to me?” I still shudder….er, sorry if that isn’t an exact quote. That’s pinnacle horror stuff rigtht there.)
There probably is a balance to be struck between layering, obfuscation – which invite discussion – and presenting a clear narrative. I love Sanderson, but it doesn’t make me try to revisit my mathematical logic books to understand Gnosis, or look up stuff about memory to understand Nonmen.
Look at it this way – I’m pretty much set on buying these books when they come out, within a week or two at most. Sanderson, much as I enjoy his stories, is someone I get around to.
1. Are you going to tease out the thematic knot connecting womb plague and the fertility goddess? Unimportant, or a key plot point?
2. Since you’ve opened up about your editing process, I wonder if you wouldn’t link the first draft of this short.
I actually rewrite and resave over the same doc. I don’t have any first draft to link to!
The big link between the Womb Plague and Yatwer is irony…
“The C n is a code of tyrants.”
Anyone care to explain? I think it’s been there since the first draft, and I don’t get it.
The circumflexed ‘u’ keeps dropping out. Though I now think it would be cool to give the Cunuroi an unwritable, unpronouncable, ‘meta-vowel.’
I sort of wonder from this version if Cinialjin was a rare hold out against Inchoroi medical ministrations. Would it not be all the more tragic if his daughter was the only nonwoman untouched by the inchoroi, the only nonwoman still able to conceive for their race? In that case, Cinialjin would almost have to kill her, or she would be warred over and bred non-stop by competing mansions. Yeah someone that valuable would probably have a very ravaged womb. Or it was CC himself that raped or impregnated Aisralu. That would fit with the ‘he knows’ addition.
Another possibility is that the C n is like First Night, part of being an Ishroi means sharing your women with you mansion leader–thus the soul curse of the Ishroi. Quya may not have to do as such.
Some cool wondering, that…
Great Ciogli teeters, his head turning as if to catch some uncommon sound from a drowse, and they see it: the lone arrow pricking from the slot of his helm.
Prior it read something like the ‘a lone, impossible arrow’ and atleast to me this kind of conjured the idea that it was impossible, that slot is so thin, the arrows should just wash over him like black rain – and yet that perception gets broken even as it’s called because he is dead! -.
“I fear that I require that you speak.”
I think I’d remove the second ‘that’, “I fear that I require you speak”. Which kind of brings to my mind a gestapo agent, but without the german accent (no, it wouldn’t feel like that to Conphas though (as much as his smile being like vertigo wouldn’t feel like vertigo to him)). Or split the sentence over two intervals “I fear that I require…” *other stuff depicted* “…that you speak.”. This drives happy ent mad, though, heh…………
Men raising scabbarded swords
Did I miss this the prior read? So they are bludgeoning the crowd? Just GBH? Hurray, civilisation comes to Earwa!
You know the worst thing? Fiction leaps to my mind of there still being a crowdmember, who’s banged has been his head, went to bed and amidst tomb cold sheets, couldn’t get up in the morning!
Aisralu!
I’ve still no idea why he pushed her. I almost suspect there is no reason at all you have, and as readers our projections on it extend and intermingle in voicing, becoming the only actual semi existant fiction ‘written’ to fill that actual void.
Finally, the realisation he has of not understand men – how he keeps having that realisation, over and over. That moment that should change, yet it just keeps repeating because he has lost that leap. That pivotal, personal moment, rendered into…what? It’s like the leap happens, but what leaps jumps into darkness and…only the prior before the leap remains, only to leap again into the darkness…? Or so I read it, anyway. Nice touch, IMO.
I’m happy with this reading. Confusion. Dislocation. Sounds like a Nonman to me!
“He has wondered how the end of memory would appear at memory’s end”
Wow. Absolutely perfect Scott. Superb piece on so many levels. Thank you for doing what you do.
Good to see you kicking around, Third Eye. Glad you liked. I’ll be posting another soon.
To Mr. Bakker –
This is not related to this particular literary work but since I’m not sure where else to reach you – this is where I am and… are the three-seas forums down forever? The domain name seems to be used for someone else’s interests now and I am just wondering if you are planning on moving some of the old data (if it still exists), making a new forum/website for the Second Apocalypse novels, or just abandoning the idea of a forum/website altogether?
Best regards
I was only tangentially involved with the site – though I’m sure I should shoulder most of the blame for its demise. So I really don’t know. It would be a crying shame – I know some people had posted essays worth of material.
We are diehard fans of the Second Apocalypse novels… it is a work which I am much indebted to. Personally, it would be fantastic to have a place all of your fanatical devotees can gather to discuss the intricacies of your novels.
Thank you for the many hours of joy and fulfillment.
Thank you, NineSwordz. You guys are the ones who make it possible. The only place now that I know of is the Other Literature section of the Westeros board. I wish I had the organizational werewithal to start up something dedicated but I can barely keep on top of this blog!
Hi Scott, read the other comments and like to think myself a fan. Love the lyricism, though got to agree with other comment about telling the story, you have to find a better balance.
Have always enjoyed your books, your prose could almost be voiced in hexameter verse by some aging Greek poet across a campfire at Olympia: ‘For the first time he realizes he has never understood Men, the way they toil against the yoke of dwindling years. The way they do not so much fail as are betrayed.’
Love the hopelessness its like the doom of men.
Though this experiment has got your fans talking and surmising, which I suspect is exactly what you wanted, I still need clarity. Who’s who? The first time I read it I thought the man was Lord Kosoter and thought it was some back story of how he came across Cleric. Then I read the comments and some of the guys had mentioned Conphas, so read it again with that in mind and came to the conclusion that, fuck man it could be Kellhus, the way he is talking: “You see, I look at you, and I see…” A sly, mortal wink. ”Me.” or “This is why I saved you… You are my map. My chart.”
Could almost be Kellhus trying to understand the Nonmen, trying to fathom the depths of the memories held in the mad mind of a Nonman. Give us a clue!
Anyway love the books and keep up the good work mate, can’t wait for TUC.
Didn’t get much sleep last night, what a geek for this stuff I have become. Read second part of Interview and some big Wow’s there! Read the appendices at back of TTT and read short story again this time all has become clear. However still feel that the lyricism needs more of a balance, I get that you are trying to put across the turbulent nature of a Nonman’s thought process, flickering in and out of memory, but for first time readers or fans who have not lived the 2nd Apocalypse experience to the extreme, you still need a balance between the lyricism and telling the story. Don’t be afraid to point out who’s who in layman terms now and then. First time I read this was a bit confused, yet it made me intrigued enough to go and re-read the appendices. It has really awoken my love of these books, so thank you, as your whole world has inspired my drawing.
Every time I look up something on your series on the Internet, I find out about three things I missed while reading the books. Maybe reading The Thousandfold Thought right after the Warrior-Prophet was a bit of a bad idea.
So much subtlety.
This was too challenging for me to unlock any mysteries of Earwa with. What struck me was the authenticity of the perceptions which accompanied the extremities. Also some moments became horrifyingly vivid in the cinema of my mind; the corpse-wearing Inchoroi emerging among the degenerate men, the Nonman faces on the Sranc (if I’m seeing what you are) and finally the overwhelming mental import of a single gesture. One of the things I love about this series is that it is truly frightening in it’s stark depictions of base ‘evil’. It makes every glimmer of goodness, as in a very flawed man like Achamian, seem a treasure.
Not sure why you deleted my contribution to the discussion again. It won’t stop me buying your work or writing positive reviews on websites. But it it did sting a bit and I get the message not to return.
Hi, No God. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just got back from holidays! If you were new to the board, your comment would have been held pending moderation – is that what you mean?
Sorry – having a bad day. Ignore my negativity.
It has been revealed that the Inchoroi used Men to conquer the Nonmen some time after the Cuno- Inchoroi wars. Mr. Bakker stated in a pretty recent interview that the Inchoroi gave the Tusk, the holy scripture of the Inrithi, to Men.
We know from Wutteat’s commentary in White Luck Warrior that the Inchoroi and their creations travelled to several worlds, obliterating the populations only to find that they were still damned. If this is the case, and they did present the Tusk to Men, then they may have subjected them to their own ancient damnation and introduced their plight to Men. Indeed, we see the Men in this story exhibiting atrocity on a level that is on par with the Inchoroi themselves.
It is true that Nonmen claim to worship the spaces between the gods, and thus avoid damnation. Khellus proclaims that they are still damned in White Luck, but it may have been that they were once able to reach oblivion using this method and the Inchoroi altered the very nature of the Outside, either with their mere presence or by introducing their beliefs to Men, who may hold more power than Nonmen pertaining to this field because there is a significantly larger population of humans.
Finally a question: Are these Tales of Atrocity canon to the series, or are they meant to gauge the reactions to different directions that the series can take?
Just two cents here. Tell the amazing story you’ve created, stop worrying if some English professor like you’re style. When you write this separate style you lose the entire dark biblical revelations theme, which I believe is pointless. I want to be brought to dark evil earwa, not some classroom where the guy in front is busy trying to impress himself.
Felt the same about the white luck chapters.
I disagree completly. To me this and the white luck chapters don’t read at all as contrived attempts at higher literature. If anything they’re the opposite, they’re bakker indulging himself and having a little fun. I would say that the consensus in the literary world is that stuff like this, stuff that plays with time and reality through narrative is more often than not contrived and lacking elegance. What you take to be the literati elevating this type of writing is just a product of the fact that on the rare occasion when this stuff succeeds it also happens to be literature of the highest caliber.
I don’t think bakker thinks that this story is by any means academically or even popularly palatable, its just self indulgence. Hes having a little fun and, in the process, giving his most ardent fans something fun to puzzle with. He has so much extra world built that he wants to share with us but that could not be elegantly squeezed into the core novels. So he indulges himself, and his fanboys, with fragments like this.
I would bet that the earlier drafts of the the second apocalypse books had far more bits like this and as bakker got older he sacrificed them for elegance.
Personally, I dig all of it. Keep it coming scott. Please.
Other stuff:
When in the timeline of conphas’ life could this have happened? I’m having trouble picking out when. Did saubon not really kill comphas? Was that a skinspy? The answer is probably really obvious and I’m just not recalling well right now. I should just reread that part.
Totally unrelated:
Anyone have any thoughts on the metaphysical implications of the chorae being created by sorcery? That was hard for me to wrap my head around from the very beginning and with the strange interaction they have with the judging eye it only became more metaphysically complicated. I’m having trouble untangling it.
All right, I’ve read the whole confusing mess again, and although I still enjoyed it, it bothers me to no end that I didn’t recognize Conphas the first time around. I don’t really get how, when, and where could he have encountered a Nonman. I was under the impression they were exceptionally rare even up north?
Which brings me to my main point: I hate literally every sentence written about the Nonmen and feel they don’t deserve such a prominent place in the series. Yes, their erratic memory is an interesting narrative gimmick, but one that IMHO should not be anywhere near the main plot. If they had been kept on the outskirts, with Akka/Seswatha only occasionally referencing them, I would’ve been perfectly OK with that. But introducing Cleric as a major character (with his very own Moria(tm) sequence, to boot) and now forcing even Sorweel’s part of the story to deal with the Gritty Elves of Earwa is… just painful to read.
IMHO, the heart of the story are the Dûnyain and their unique relationship with humanity. Wasting so much time on Nonmen is almost as irritating as the awful linguistic metastasis that permeates the entire series. Cûnûroi, Ishroi and Quaya, Aujic, Auja-Gilcunni, Gilcunya, High Kunna, Ihrimsu, etc, etc… I could do without. Other than all that, I’m loving the series.
I remember reading a long while ago on the old three seas blog, at least a year before the publication of the Judging Eye, that your next project was going to be a book about Cujara Cinmoi. I’m really enjoying the aspect emperor trilogy and I’m glad you took that route, but I would very much like to read the a book set during Cujara Cinmoi’s lifetime. Context baiting for someone as familiar with the series as me is immensly rewarding and often a jaw-dropping experience. And it spreads from there. Like vectors of infection. Ive gotten at least twelve people I can think of to read at least the first trilogy.
And you know how I ended up picking up the darkness that comes before? It was prominently shelved at Tacoma public library in Washington, it was fantasy (which I was looking for having no job at the time), and the subtitle ‘the Prince of Nothing’, that was the clincher.
Thanks for spreading the word! I’ve actually discussed this with my agent, the prospect of doing a prequel of some kind, but simply because TDTCB defeats so many readers with its complexity. The series needs something more accessible to ground it. I actually have around 20G’s written on something set during the Scholastic Wars: the tale of a Holca champion of the Sranc Pits.
Whats a Holca champion?!
🙂
Did I even mention them here? Boy, you’re in for a treat!
Can’t wait to hear about Holca champions! However, since you’re responding to this thread – is there any update on when The Unholy Consort might be released / what state it is editorially etc? 🙂
Consort == Consult!?
No word yet, I fear.
How do people figure the Man in this story is Conphas? Is that mentioned elsewhere or does it follow from the story (cause I don’t see it)?
Hi Bakker, is TUC going to clarify how the Womb-Plague happened? Because the general impression on Westeros is that the story makes little sense.
Was the immortality of the males an unintended effect of a weapon that was supposed to kill both the men and the women?
Did the Inchoroi make the men immortal on purpose?
Did they try to make them all immortal?
Did they give them immortality to buy themselves time until the Womb-Plague was administered?
…
All of those cases bring up some huge question marks to be honest.
I read this blog entry recently about the person describing their own life and it reminded me of this story…
Late to the party here.
This was not at all confusing to me, since I read it right after a binge of The Judging eye and The White Luck Warrior binge, on the recommendation of a pyramid-dwelling Fanim heathen friend, and it made things click about the Nonman memory.
It reads exactly like how the Nonman thought process should, perhaps it’s my own ADHD wrong-wired erratic brain, but I think it is a damn good representation of the erratic thought and memory process.
Interesting comments about the literary readers being picky, I am actually hyping up the Second Apocalypse books to the high brow literary types I know since I think they could appreciate them better than the mainstream fantasy readers.
I’m glad you like Leona! The piece makes me uncomfortable primarily because it alienates so many mainstream readers. But then, one of the goals has always been to write something so over-the-top EPIC that mainstream readers would be forced to go on the slog. I’ve actually added this as an Appendix to The Unholy Consult.
I had to reread parts of it multiple times and go over certain parts as though reading Shakespeare and let themes bubble to the surface rather than getting caught in the plot, but I loved it. It is frustrating and dense and only half rewarding yet it pushes some of the more disturbing themes you have been flogging us with even further.
I loved the parallels between the Inchoroi, non-men and then humans as Mekeritrig says “salvation through anguish and degradation” and the dying non-man, “the magic that is brutality” and then Conphas (?) “blessed reprieve from boredom”. The crushing nihilism brought on by immortality and damnation leading to the need for brutality to move the soul at all.
I have yet to read TGO or TUC (going through the first 4 again in preparation), but so much pathology is piling up that I can’t see this ending well.
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