There are 92 chapters in the series and two short interludes.

There are about 32 weeks from today until the book comes out.  That means if we started lets say, next week, we would need to read 3 Chapters per week to finish early.

hey all, since Somna is going to be doing a vid with Bakker Bro, i would like to put together a vid of Quinthane's work set to music.  "Requiem for a Dream" was not brutal enough for the tastes of many Bakker fans --> what songs would say BAKKER and QUINTHANE???  please tell me because i still listend to Pearl Jam too much

Wolf Eyes - A Million Years

I'll see what my schedule is looking like around then, but I think I'd be down for this.

Regarding the timing discrepancy, it might just be a recon, something that had to change for the continuity of where the story is going to make sense. That or there really was blank space and the Ketyai were capable of adding to it.

Something that I mentioned in the Westeros thread, how the Fanim had sworn to destroy the Tusk. Makes me think Fane knew what was going on, and further darkens Kellhus' intent in wiping out the Cishaurim and their religion, both during and after the holy war. Makes it very haunting when Kellhus is using Fanim blood to draw a Tusk on foreheads.

That's true.  While I am definitely not a "Fane was right" kind-of guy, perhaps there is something to it.  By this I mean I never doubted the Fane had "divine" inspiration, I just don't think that the Solitary God is much more than any of the 100.  Perhaps though, he (it) is?  What if the Solitary God is some proto-Kellhus, transcendent?  The question then is, who could have transcended and also know of the Inchoroi deception?

I'm off the rails now...

just read this part in TWLW and i couldnt help but be reminded of your post

Quote

"Do you remember your wife?"
"I remember all that I have lost."
She is beautiful. She knows she is beautiful because she so resembles her mother, Esmenet, who was the most celebrated beauty in the Three Seas. And mortal beauty, she knows, finds its measure in the immortal...
"How did she die?"
A single tear falls from his right eye, hangs like a bead of glass from his jaw. "With the others... Cir'kumir teles pim'larata..."
"Do I resemble her?"
"Perhaps..." he says, lowering his gaze. "If you wept or screamed... If there was blood."
She moves closer, into the smell of him, sits so that her knees brush his shins. His pouch hangs from his waist, partially hooked in a miniature thicket of stems. Vertigo billows through her, a sudden horror of tipping, as if the pouch were a babe set too close to a table's edge. She clutches his forearms.
"You tremble," she whispers, resisting the urge to glance at the pouch. "Do you want me? Do you want to..." She swallows. "To take me?"
He draws away his arms, stares down into his palms. Beyond him, clouds pile like inky flotsam beneath the stars. Dry lightning scorches the plains a barren white. She glimpses land piling atop land, scabbed edges, woollen reaches.
"I want to..." he says.
"Yes?"
He lifts his eyes as if drawing them against weighted threads. "I... I want to... to strangle you... to split you with my—"
His breath catches. Murder floats in the sorrow of his gaze. He speaks like someone marooned in a stranger's soul. "I want to hear you shriek."
And she can feel the musky strength of him, the impotence of her flailing arms, clawing fingers, should he simply choose...
What? a stranded fragment of her asks. What are you doing? She's not quite certain what she intends to do, let alone what she hopes to accomplish. Is she seducing him? For Achamian? For the Qirri?
Or has she finally broken under the weight of her suffering? Is that what it is? After all this time, is she still the child traded between sailors, weeping to the moan of timbers and men?
She glimpses herself climbing into the circuit of Cleric's arms, taking his waist into the circuit of her legs. Her breath catches at the thought of his antique virility, the union of her flower and his stone. Her stomach quails at the thought of his arcane disfigurement, the ugliness heaving against her, into her.
"Because you love me?"
"I..."
He grimaces, and she glimpses Sranc howling by the light of sorcerous fire. He raises his face to the vault of the night, and she sees a world before human nations, a nocturnal age, when Nonmen marched in hosts from their great underworld mansions, driving the Sons of Men before them.
"No!" Cleric cries. "No! Because I... I need to remember! I must remember!"
And miraculously, she sees it. Her purpose and her intent.
"And so you must betray..."
His passion blows from him, and he falls still—very still. Clarity peers out from his eyes, a millennial assurance. Gone is the bewildered stoop, the listless air of indecision. He pulls his shoulders and arms into an antique pose of nobility. He draws his hands behind him, seems to clasp them in the small of his back. It is a posture she recognizes from Cil-Aujas and its innumerable engravings.
The voices of the scalpers continue to feud and bicker. The clouds continue to climb, a shroud drawing across the gaping bowl of Heaven. The Captain is speaking, but low rolling thunder obscures his voice.
The first darts of rain tap across the dust and grasses.
"Who?" Mimara presses. "Who are you, truly?"
The immortal Ishroi watches her, his smile wry, his eyes luminous with something too profound to be mere regret.
"Nil'giccas..." he murmurs. "I am Nil'giccas. The Last Nonman King."

id be interested to know if anyone can interpret "With the others... Cir'kumir teles pim'larata..."

i think the theory that the nonmen murdered their women in a sexual-violence fuelled effort to remember their love for them after being granted immortality/erraticism is disturbing enough to just be true.

definitely an effective weapon to seal the world and damn the nonmen and get them onside with the inchoroi agenda.

That's a great catch there, I wish we had more examples of Nonmen speaking Ihrimsû so that we would have a better idea what these mean.

If we take the theory that the Nonmen can only remember through reproduction of the context of the original memory, or at least, through it's simulation, then his insistence that the sexualized violence toward Mimara will help him remember his wife signifies that, at the very least, his memory of her is tied to such violence.

It's certainly some strong circumstantial evidence.  I think the closest we come to direct evidence is in Four Revelations.  If you haven't yet seen it, I tried to do a color coded version here in an attempt to render the disjunctive nature of the narrative more readable.

Again, great post, thanks for bring that up.

OK, so some interesting questions were raised about The Tusk, as in, how it was made, why a Tusk, and so on.

Here's some collected thoughts I had:

First off we had an interested quote from Scott, in an interview on Pat's Fantasy Hotlist:

So the Inchoroi began giving them (Chorae) to the Men of Eärwa, hoping to incite them to rebellion. But the Halaroi had no stomach for rousing a feared, and most importantly, absent master, and so rendered the deadly gifts to their Nonmen overlords. The Inchoroi then looked to Eänna, where the Men were both more fierce and more naive. They gave the Chorae to the Five Tribes as gifts, and to one tribe, the black-haired Ketyai, they gave a great tusk inscribed with their hallowed laws and most revered stories–as well as one devious addition: the divine imperative to invade the ‘Land of the Felled Sun’ and hunt down and exterminate the ‘False Men.

This made me think that the Inchoroi gave the Tusk to the Ketyai before the Breaking of the Gates.  However, in tDtCB we're told:

Ribboned by characters, the Tusk recorded the great migratory invasions that marked the ascendancy of Men in Eärwa.

Well, that is interesting.  Two possibilities here: either the Tusk was inscribed with this information before the Breaking, meaning that all human migration was planned and directed by the Inchoroi, or the Tusk post-dates the Breaking.  Each is interesting in their own way, the first even further pointing out that the Tusk is viramsata not just spiritually, but actually directed the Tribes to certain places (most likely being the location of specific Nonmen mansions).

On the other hand, if the Tusk was inscribed after the Breaking, well, then Year 0 of the Tusk is not the Breaking of the Gates, it's the inscribing of the Tusk.  There is a further curiosity as well, which is the complete lack of any information on the Cûno-Halaroi Wars, which would seem kind of critical information.  If they felt like inscribing migratory information, why not inscribe the fighting they saw there too?

There is, of course, another option, that being the idea that the Tusk predated the Breaking, but was simply not inscribed.  The question then would be how did the Ketyai get it to Sumna?  Perhaps that is what Scott is saying that the Inchoroi gave it to the Ketyai, that they brought it from Eanna to Earwa for them, and presented it with the inscriptions.  More on this later.

The glossery entry for the Tusk says:

Since the Tusk bears the oldest extant version of The Chronicle of the Tusk, which in turn is the oldest human text, its provenance remains an utter mystery, though most scholars agree that it predates the coming of the Tribes to Eärwa.

And yet, the glossary entry for the Chronicle says:

It consists of the following six books:
 
Book of Canticles—The old “Tusk Laws” regarding every aspect of personal and public life, which were superseded in the Inrithi tradition by the revised strictures of The Tractate.
Book of Gods—The primary scripture of the Cults, enumerating the various gods, and explaining the rites of purification and propitiation basic to each.
Book of Hintarates—The story of Hintarates, an upright man plagued with apparently undeserved adversity.
Book of Songs—A collection of verse prayers and parables extolling the virtues of piety, manliness, courage, and tribal loyalty.
Book of Tribes—The extended narrative of the first Prophets and Chieftain-Kings of the Five Tribes of Men before the invasion of Eärwa.
Book of Warrants—The account of the observances governing the interactions between castes.

None of those books would seem to detail "the great migratory invasions that marked the ascendancy of Men in Eärwa" that is said the Tusk has inscribed on it in tDtCB.  So, was that just an error on Scott's part?  Or is it that the Chronicle is the real "holy work" and the Tusk was just it's manipulation?

Also, the matter of Angeshraël, who is "most famed Old Prophet of the Tusk, responsible for leading the Five Tribes of Men into Eärwa," of whom we are told by Kellhus:

When he had eaten and was content, sacred Husyelt, the Holy Stalker, joined him at his fire, for the Gods in those days had not left the world in the charge of Men. Angeshraël, recognizing the God as the God, fell immediately to his knees before the fire, not thinking where he would throw his face.”

Angeshraël bows himself into a fire, in the presence of a "god" who still walked the world?  A fire that does not consume him, but enlightens him, in other words an Inverse Fire?  What a coincidence that after meeting this "god" he does exactly as the Inchoroi would want him to do, that is, lead the Tribes to Break the Gates.  I think that Angeshraël actually met Aurang on Mount Eshki, where he was seduced by the "truth" as presented in the Fire.  Aurang convinced him to lead the Tribes into Earwa, since he knew that they were losing to the Nonmen, that the Ark was under such siege that it was time to take the fight to the Nonmen's mansions.

OK, enought crack-pot for now, weigh in guys on how far off you think I am.

Quote from: H on October 29, 2015, 02:39:14 pm

Quote from: Wilshire on October 29, 2015, 02:23:00 pm

On the other thiught, about prophesy and viramsata, I agree. It'd likely not relevent if a prophesy is true, but only that people believe it to be. That's why the consult mentions they must follow all prophesies, even the false ones.

Exactly.  The whole Great Ordeal smacks of being viramsata, because The Thousandfold Thought is too.  It's all a lie being acted out.

Eureka!  So the directive to "follow all prophecies" more or less means to "reinforce false beliefs".  That's been bothering me, like, forever.

I still wonder what the false prophecy in question actually is.  It's hard for me to imagine that it's the Celmomian -- how would the Consult benefit from people believing that Mimara (or her baby) could be the one to fulfill the process?  Seems way more likely that they'd support Kellhus as "the one".  Especially if they need a couple hundred thousand souls delivered to Golgotterath to raise the No-God.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.  I guess what Aurang could mean by "even the false ones" are that perhaps some of them are contradictory to each other?

So, from the earliest days of reading TTT, something has always sort of bothered me:

“But on the Plains of Mengedda,” he said. “The Shrial Knights … What I prophesied came to pass.” To the worldborn these words would have sounded blank, devoid of concern or occasion. But to a Dûnyain …

Let him think I waver.

“A fortuitous Correspondence of Cause,” Moënghus replied, “nothing more. That which comes before yet determines that which comes after. How else could you have achieved all that you have achieved? How else could you be possible?”

He was right. Prophecy could not be. If the ends of things governed their beginnings, if what came after determined what came before, then how could he have mastered the souls of so many? And how could the Thousandfold Thought come to rule the Three Seas? The Principle of Before and After simply had to be true, if its presumption could so empower …
His father had to be right.

So what was this certainty, this immovable conviction, that he was wrong?

Am I mad?

This never made any sense to me.  Moe is certainly misleading him here.  He knows that Prophecy is real, because he'll later tell Kellhus how this is so:

“Have you heard of a game played in southern Nilnamesh, a game called viramsata, or ‘many-breaths’?”
“No.”
“Across the plains surrounding the city of Invishi, the ruling caste-nobles are very remote, very effete. The narcotics they cultivate assure them of the obedience of their populations. Over the centuries they have elaborated jnan to the point where it has eclipsed their old faiths. Entire lives are spent in what we would call gossip. But viramsata is far different from the rumours of the court or the clucking of harem-eunuchs—far more. The players of viramsata have made games of truth. They tell lies about who said what to whom, about who makes love to whomever, and so on. They do this continually, and what is more, they are at pains to act out the lies told by others, especially when they are elegant, so they might make them true. And so it goes from tongue to lip to tongue, until no distinction remains between what is a lie and what is true.

Prophecy is real.  It doesn't violate the principle of Before and After.  It's simply a story, crafted to put this who hear it at pains to exact it.  Kellhus realizes this, because he will later do exactly this, craft a story to have people do exactly what he wants.

The Celmomian Prophecy was what started it all.  The Celmomian Prophecy is a lie, it is simply Seswatha's way of casting his will into the future.  The question is, does Kellhus realize this?  I think the answer is that he thinks he does.  He thinks he has out thought Seswatha though.  Remember, Moe tells him, point blank, "nothing violates the Principle of Before and After."  Kellhus thinks he knows all the before of Seswatha.  He can't, because almost everything he/we know of Seswatha is a lie or misdirection.  Kellhus can't truly precede "what comes before" simply because he can't/doesn't know what it really was.  He imagines he does, but I don't think he truly does.

My crack-pot theory is on record that while Kellhus thinks he walks the trackless steppe, Seswatha has really preceded him at basically every turn.