The Second Apocalypse

Earwa => The Prince of Nothing => The Almanac: PON Edition => Topic started by: TheCulminatingApe on January 13, 2019, 06:53:49 pm

Title: ARC: TTT Chapter 3
Post by: TheCulminatingApe on January 13, 2019, 06:53:49 pm
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If soot stains your tunic, dye it black.  This is vengeance.
- EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES

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Here we find further argument for Gotagga's supposition that the world is round.  How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?
- AJENCUS, DISCOURSE ON WAR
Title: Re: ARC: TTT Chapter 3
Post by: TheCulminatingApe on January 16, 2019, 09:09:27 pm
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... when the hot winds chased the clouds to oblivion, they simply followed the forage, always searching for the wild herbs and short grasses that made for the best meat and milk.
This pursuit always caught someone, particularly those who were too greedy to cull wilful animals from their herd.  Headstrong cattle could lead an entire herd too far afield, into vast tracks of over-grazed or blighted pasture.  Every season, it seemed, some fool returned without horse of cattle.
Cnaiur now knew himself to be that fool.
I have given him the Holy War

Various notables are in the council chamber in Caraskand, including Akka
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The sorceror, that woman-hearted buffoon whom everyone thought dead...
, and the Great Names
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... now little more than counsellors, and they knew it...
For the first time in their lives they stood upon trackless ground...

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...What would they do, the devout and self-righteous alike?  What would they do now that their hallowed scripture could talk back?

Kellhus has
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... given them dominion.  Over their doubts.  Over their most hated foes. He had made them strong.
But how could lies do such a thing?

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Unlike the Inrithi, he [Cnaiur] did not stand within the circle of the Dunyain's deceit.  Where they saw things from within, he saw them from without.  He saw more.  It was strange the way beliefs could have an inside and an outside, that what looked like hope or truth or love from within could be scythe or a hammer, things wielded for other ends, when seen from without.
Tools.

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The Inrithi, Proyas had told him once, believed it was the lot of men to live within the designs, inscrutable or otherwise, of those greater than themselves.  And in this sense, Cnaiur realised, Kellhus truly was their prophet.  They were, as the memorialists claimed, willing slaves, always striving to beat down the furies that drove them to sovereign ends.  That the designs - the tracks - they claimed to follow were authored in the Outside simply served their vanity, allowed them to abase themselves in a manner that fanned their overweening pride.  There was no greater tyranny, the memorialists said, than that exercised by slaves over slaves.
But now the slaver stood among them.  What did it matter, Kellhus had asked as they crossed the Steppe, that he mastered those already enslaved?  There was no honour, only advantage.  To believe in honour was to stand inside things, to keep company with slaves and fools.

Saubon will not march to Shimeh.  Caraskand is his.

Conphas tells them that the whole thing is a fraud.
Kellhus puts him in his place
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"... you don't know whether to offer the same pretence of submission that you offer your uncle or to discredit me with open words.  So now you deny me out of desperation, not to to prove to others that I'm a fraud but to prove yourself that you are in fact my better.  For an obscene arrogance dwells within you, Ikurei Conphas, the belief that you are the measure of all other men.  It is this lie that you seek to preserve at all costs...

...To preserve your pride before me, you must endure the shame of lying.  You must conceal who you are, in order to prove who you are.  You must degrade yourself to remain proud.  At this moment you see this more clearly than at other time in your life, and yet still you refuse to relinquish, to yield to your tormented pride.  You trade the anguish that breeds anguish for the anguish that breeds release.  You would rather take pride in what you are not than take pride in what you are...

...Shame is a stranger to you, Ikurei Conphas.  An unbearable stranger"

Conphas speaks his contempt for the others and leaves.  Kellhus commands him to halt.

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"... Pride is a sickness... For most it's a fever, a contagion goaded by the glories of others.  But for some, like you Ikurei Conphas, it is a defect carried from the womb.  For your whole life you've wondered what it was that moved the men about you.  Why would a father sell himself into slavery, when he need only strangle his children?  Why would a young man take the Orders of the Tusk, exchange the luxuries of his station for a cubicle, authority for servitude to the Holy Shriah?  Why do so many give, when it is so easy to take?
But you ask these questions because you know nothing of strength.  For what is strength but the resolve to deny base inclinations - the determination to sacrifice in the name of one's brothers?  You, Ikurei Conphas, know only weakness, and because it takes strength to acknowledge weakness, you call your weakness strength.  You betray your brother.  You fresco your heart with flatteries.  You, who are less than any man, say to yourself, 'I am a god'"

Cnaiur is for a moment 'inside'

The Nansur are to disarm and march to Joktha to take ship home.  Kellhus knows they have conspired with the Fanim.

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The Dunyain simply culled the wilful from his herd

Proyas is thinking on what has come to pass
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What had he been thinking?  How could he, a man who had meticulously hammered his heart into the very shape of piety, have come so close to murdering the God's own voice?
The thought still dizzied him, struck him nauseous with shame.
Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true.  This was a hard lesson, made all harder by its astounding conspicuousness.  Despite the exhortations of kings and generals, despite the endless lays, belief unto death was cheap.  After all, the Fanim threw themselves against the spears of their enemies as readily as the Inrithi.  Someone had to be deluded.  So what ensured that that someone was someone else?  Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?
And to make such obvious conceit the grounds condemnation... of murder...
In all his life, Proyas had never wept so hard as he had at the Warrior-Prophet's feet.  For he, who had decried avarice in all its forms, had proven the most avaricious of all.  He had coveted nothing so much as the truth, and since truth had so roundly eluded him, he had turned to his beliefs.  How could he not when he'd spent a lifetime abasing himself before them, when they afforded him such a luxury of judgement?
When they were so much who he was.
The promise of rebirth was at once the threat of murder, and Proyas, like so many others, had opted to kill rather than die.

Proyas can see halos around Kellhus' fingers.

Cnaiur knows Proyas has been set by Kellhus.  Cnaiur is to remain in Joktha - to kill Conphas.  Culled from the herd.

Iyokus is in a grove surrounded by Chorae bowmen.  There are great stone dolmens there.
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...Such remnants, he thought, were the metric of ages, the pilings of the present. They spoke of a time when no Caraskand had encompassed these hills, a time when his own ancestors had ranged the endless plains beyond the Great Kayarsus.  To lay eyes on such monuments, he knew, to truly see them, was to understand the terrifying of dimensions of what had been forgotten.

Another sorceror approaches.  Achamian.  Kellhus is not there.
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"You were deceived," the Mandate Schoolman said...
..."He's given you to me, Iyokus.  The Warrior-Prophet.  I asked for vengeance.  I begged.

They fight.  Sorcerous combat.  The Gnosis is the stronger.

Cnaiur rides out into the hills.
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He was no longer of the People.  He was more.  There was no thought he could not think.  No act he could undertake.  No lips he could not kiss...  Nothing was forbidden.

He dreams of Serwe, and then she is there.  He catches her in a clearing.  Her face flies apart - a skin-spy.  The Synthese arrives.
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"Old," the tiny face said in a reedy voice.  "Old is the covenant between our peoples."
Cnaiur stared in horror.  "I belong to no people," he said blankly.
A vertiginous silence.  It peered at him with an avian canniness, as though forced to revisit certain long standing assumptios.
"Perhaps," it said.  "But something binds you to him.  You would not have saved him otherwise.  You would not have killed my child"
Cnaiur spat.  "Nothing binds me"
It craned its tiny face to the side, bird-curious.
"But the past binds us all, Scylvendi, as the bow binds the flight of an arrow.  All of us have been nocked, raised and released.  All that remains is to see where we land... to see whether we strike true."

It knows about Moenghus - how?

Cnaiur thinks his hunt is over.  But the Synthese tells him he has been moved, nothing more.

Akka comes to Ximenus, who is very drunk.  He gives him Iyokus' eyes. Xin puts them into his own sockets.  He still cannot see.
Poor Xinemus.  Both tragic and pitiful.

Blinded, Iyokus comes back to Eleazaras.
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"The words," Eleazaras hissed.  "Do you remember the words?"
In sorcery, everything depended on the purity of meaning.  Who knew what blinding might do?
"Y-yessss."
"Then you are whole"
Title: Re: ARC: TTT Chapter 3
Post by: TheCulminatingApe on January 17, 2019, 09:00:34 pm
Iyokus is in a grove surrounded by Chorae bowmen.  There are great stone dolmens there.
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...Such remnants, he thought, were the metric of ages, the pilings of the present. They spoke of a time when no Caraskand had encompassed these hills, a time when his own ancestors had ranged the endless plains beyond the Great Kayarsus.  To lay eyes on such monuments, he knew, to truly see them, was to understand the terrifying of dimensions of what had been forgotten.

Did the Nonmen erect the dolmens? or the Emwama?
Title: Re: ARC: TTT Chapter 3
Post by: TheCulminatingApe on January 17, 2019, 09:03:38 pm
Conphas tells them that the whole thing is a fraud.
Kellhus puts him in his place
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"... you don't know whether to offer the same pretence of submission that you offer your uncle or to discredit me with open words.  So now you deny me out of desperation, not to to prove to others that I'm a fraud but to prove yourself that you are in fact my better.  For an obscene arrogance dwells within you, Ikurei Conphas, the belief that you are the measure of all other men.  It is this lie that you seek to preserve at all costs...

...To preserve your pride before me, you must endure the shame of lying.  You must conceal who you are, in order to prove who you are.  You must degrade yourself to remain proud.  At this moment you see this more clearly than at other time in your life, and yet still you refuse to relinquish, to yield to your tormented pride.  You trade the anguish that breeds anguish for the anguish that breeds release.  You would rather take pride in what you are not than take pride in what you are...

...Shame is a stranger to you, Ikurei Conphas.  An unbearable stranger"

Conphas speaks his contempt for the others and leaves.  Kellhus commands him to halt.

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"... Pride is a sickness... For most it's a fever, a contagion goaded by the glories of others.  But for some, like you Ikurei Conphas, it is a defect carried from the womb.  For your whole life you've wondered what it was that moved the men about you.  Why would a father sell himself into slavery, when he need only strangle his children?  Why would a young man take the Orders of the Tusk, exchange the luxuries of his station for a cubicle, authority for servitude to the Holy Shriah?  Why do so many give, when it is so easy to take?
But you ask these questions because you know nothing of strength.  For what is strength but the resolve to deny base inclinations - the determination to sacrifice in the name of one's brothers?  You, Ikurei Conphas, know only weakness, and because it takes strength to acknowledge weakness, you call your weakness strength.  You betray your brother.  You fresco your heart with flatteries.  You, who are less than any man, say to yourself, 'I am a god'"

Shades of Gandalf and Saruman after the fall of Isengard.
Title: Re: ARC: TTT Chapter 3
Post by: TheCulminatingApe on January 17, 2019, 09:08:51 pm
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Unlike the Inrithi, he [Cnaiur] did not stand within the circle of the Dunyain's deceit.  Where they saw things from within, he saw them from without.  He saw more.  It was strange the way beliefs could have an inside and an outside, that what looked like hope or truth or love from within could be scythe or a hammer, things wielded for other ends, when seen from without.
Tools.

Quote
The Inrithi, Proyas had told him once, believed it was the lot of men to live within the designs, inscrutable or otherwise, of those greater than themselves.  And in this sense, Cnaiur realised, Kellhus truly was their prophet.  They were, as the memorialists claimed, willing slaves, always striving to beat down the furies that drove them to sovereign ends.  That the designs - the tracks - they claimed to follow were authored in the Outside simply served their vanity, allowed them to abase themselves in a manner that fanned their overweening pride.  There was no greater tyranny, the memorialists said, than that exercised by slaves over slaves.
But now the slaver stood among them.  What did it matter, Kellhus had asked as they crossed the Steppe, that he mastered those already enslaved?  There was no honour, only advantage.  To believe in honour was to stand inside things, to keep company with slaves and fools.

This tells us how the Gods 'work'. 

If Cnaiur is 'outside', then is he somehow more than other men, divine, a god?  If Kellhus seems to be 'inside' and 'outside' at the same time, what is he? 
They are both
(click to show/hide)
, is this foreshadowing?
Title: Re: ARC: TTT Chapter 3
Post by: Dora Vee on January 17, 2019, 09:44:56 pm
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The Inrithi, Proyas had told him once, believed it was the lot of men to live within the designs, inscrutable or otherwise, of those greater than themselves.

You know what bugs me is that Proyas never thought to question this. Why should it be "their lot" and who the hell is "greater"? Why? And even if someone IS greater, people can live their lives by their own designs or at least try to. Then again, I'm forgetting what world Earwa is.

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There was no greater tyranny, the memorialists said, than that exercised by slaves over slaves.

They're not entirely off on that...