Quote from: Gaston de Foix on February 09, 2014, 02:22:01 am

I actually thought the threat to Kellhus would have been chorae wielding skin spies rather than the Mages. None of the Consult seemed to have achieved any acts of great valour in the Second Apocalypse...if Akka can hold off Cleric, Kellhus can kick Quya ass.

It's a question of numbers, Gaston.

Achamian barely lives singing nothing but Wards, one on one. And on ZTS Bakker suggested that there are hundreds of Erratics working with the Consult.

How many can Kellhus really take on... 10?

I'd be more worried about the twins. The Inchoroi mastered biotech so long ago that they eventually forgot how to do it. They piled graft after graft, enhancement after enhancemet, onto themselves for untold millenia. I'd imagine that Aurang and Aurax are extremely powerful Gnostic sorcerors. And their alien minds may be able to do some very weird shit with it. I don't really think we should assume that Kellhus is the greatest living sorceror on Earwa.

Hell, look at what Aurang did to Esmenet. Not merely a compulsion, but a full possession. For a time, she was Aurang. And that was done while Aurang was in a synthese, and very far from his actual body, both of which I get the impression make for serious attenuation of his actual magical power.

Well if adding innuterals makes the magic better, it might help to have another soul using another 2 or 3 while the physical caster is using the utteral and another 1 or 2 inutterals.

Kelmomas/Samarmas are quite possibly one of the worst people on Earwa, and that's really saying something. The knowledge that he's one of the Few, and potentially far, far more powerful than even his father makes me fear for the future.

I find it interesting how the readers seem to get caught up in Kellhus' deception of divinity at roughly the same pace Kellhus does.

That "I am the Promise" line meant nothing.  It conveyed no infomation. That was the point. She could put anything she wanted into it and so be satisfied. And so she became Kellhus' willing slave. At that stage in his existence, Kellhus talks to people the same way you'd put coins in a vending machine. It's simply an action meant to trigger a desired conditioned response.

Saying rape isn't about sex is like saying gluttony isn't about taste.

That said, Cnaiur is batshit and in this particular instance I think the raw violence and degradation of the act was the biggest part of it. I'd say it was composed of 60% raw "I AM THE MOST VIOLENT OF MEN", 30% "The Steppe is trackless" where it's just a means of breaking him and there are no taboos, and a slim 10% "Y'know, that dude's actually kinda hot."

Has anyone else noticed a trend of people assuming that bisexuals don't exist? Usually when a character like this turns up I see more than half the people concluding that they're gay and that any heterosexual act is just denial, an attempt to hide their real orientation, or just them trying to meet society's expectations; rather than the simpler explanation of the person just being sexually attracted to both genders.

I still think that Kellhus never truly grasped the Thousandfold Thought. He just thinks he has. But I'm a big proponent of the "The trial has broken him." position.

On further thought I think he was reconsidering upon seeing Serwe, but The Thing Called Serwe is a Skin Spy that just watched an act of terrible violence, had just finished its mission, and was horny as hell. Meanwhile, Cnaiur is now expendable.

The Thing Called Serwe felt like celebrating, and Cnaiur died screaming.

I just want to point out that the concept of "species" is just an arbitrary category that's there for ease of use and doesn't reflect scientific morality, even with the old biological definition of "the largest community of organisms that can mutually reproduce viable offspring." You still get weird shit like "ring species" where population A can breed with population B, and population B can breed with population C...but population C cannot breed with population A. How many species are there? Where do they start and stop?

That said, a thousand years is pretty quick for hominid reproductive cycles (and modern Dunyain take longer to gestate than other Homo sapiens) to produce a complete genetic isolate. But, with a very small population in the first place (profound genetic bottleneck) and a very rigorous selective breeding program (Dunyain do not tolerate defectives and I suspect mated with each other the way another human would breed horses) could possibly result in the pretty extreme compatibility problems Kellhus has with Esmi, if you got really lucky with mutations and the genotypes of the initial breeding population.

So yeah, as a biologist (though admittedly, not an evolutionary biologist), I'd say it's plausible enough for fiction, and a neat twist. It doesn't challenge my suspension of disbelief.

I like this idea.  Mimara has twins!  One is dead like what happened with old Celmomas?  Sranc hide makes a great material for a double stroller.

I'm pretty sure Kelmomas is already the recapitulation of Celmomas.