Earwa > The Almanac: PON Edition

ARC: TTT Chapter 9

<< < (2/2)

TheCulminatingApe:

--- Quote from: TheCulminatingApe on February 17, 2019, 03:34:07 pm ---
--- Quote ---They wandered red-eyed, exchanging moon-pale landscapes for sun-bright, and Cnaiur fell to reckoning the oddities of his soul.  He supposed he was insane, though the more he pondered the word, the more uncertain its meaning became.  On several occasions he had presided over the ritual throat-cutting of Utemot pronounced insane by the tribal elders.  According to the memorialists, men went feral in the manner of dogs and horses, and in like manner had to be put down.  The Inrithi, he knew, thought insanity the work of  demons.

One night during the infancy of the Holy War - and for reasons that Cnaiur could no longer recall - the sorceror had taken a crude parchment map if the Three Seas and pressed it flat over a copper laver filled with water.  he had poked holes of varying sizes throughout the parchment, and when he held his oil lantern high to complement the firelight, little beads of water glinted across the tanned landscape.  Each man, he explained, was a kind of hole in existence, a point where the Outside penetrated the world.  He tapped one of the beads with his finger.  It broke, staining the surrounding parchment.  When the trials of the world broke men, he explained, the Outside leaked into the world.
This he said was madness.

At the time, Cnaiur had been less than impressed.  He had despised the sorceror, thinking him one of those mewling souls who forever groaned beneath burdens of their own manufacture.  He had dismissed all things him out if hand.  But now, the force of his demonstration seemed indisputable.  Something other inhabited him.
It was peculiar.  Sometimes it seemed that each of his eyes answered to a different master, that his every look involved war and loss.  Sometimes it seemed he possessed two faces, an honest outer expression, which  he sunned beneath the open sky, and a more devious inner countenance.  If he concentrated, he could almost feel its muscles - deep, twitching webs of them - beneath the musculature that stretched his skin.  But is was elusive, like the presentiment of hate in a brother's glance.  And it was profound, sealed like marrow within living bone.  There was no distance!  No way to frame it within his comprehension.  And how could there be?  When it thought, he was...
The bead had been broken - there could be no doubt of that.  According to the sorceror, madness all came down to the question of origins.  If the divine possessed him, he would be some kind of visionary or prophet.  If the demonic...

The sorceror's demonstration seemed indisputable.  It accorded with his nagging intuitions.  It explained, among other things, the strange affinities between madness and insight - why the soothsayers of one age could be the bedlamites of another.  The problem, of course was the Dunyain.
He contradicted all of it.
Cnaiur had watched him ply the roots of man after man and thus command their branching action.  Nursing their hatred.  Cultivating their shame and their conceit.  Nurturing their love.  Herding their reasons, breeding their beliefs!  And all with nothing more than mundane word and expression - nothing more than worldly things.
The Dunyain, Cnaiur realised, acted as though there were no holes in the sorceror's parchment map, no beads to signify souls, no water to mark the Outside.  He assumed a world where the branching actions of one man could become the roots of another.  And with this elementary assumption he had conquered the acts of thousands.
He has conquered the Holy War.

The insight sent Cnaiur reeling, for it suddenly seemed that he rode through two different worlds, one open, where the roots of men anchored them to something beyond, and another closed, where those selfsame roots were entirely contained.  What would it mean to be mad in such a closed world?  But such a world could not be!  Ingrown and insensate.  Cold and soulless.
There had to be more.

Besides, he couldn't be mad, he decided, because he possessed no origins.  He had kicked free of all earth.  He didn't even possess a past.  Not really.  What he remembered, he always remembered now.  He - Cnaiur urs Skiotha - was the ground of what came before.  He was his own foundation!
Laughing, he thought of the Dunyain and how, upon their fatal reunion, this would overthrow him.

He tried - once - to share these ruminations with Serwe and the others, but they could offer him only the simulacrum of understanding.  How could they fathom his depths when they themselves possessed none?  They were not bottomless holes in the world, as he was.  They were animate, yet they did not live, not truly.  They, he realised with no little horror, had no souls.  They dwelt utterly within the world.
And for no reason, his love of them - his love of her - became all the more fierce.
--- End quote ---

--- End quote ---

Cnaiur's chapter's are always engaging and well worth quoting - and there's always lots to quote.
This seems to imply that he might be possessed, and the reference to the 'great horned shadow around around him' from the Conphas paragraphs, tells those who have read TAE who it might be.  I don't think this can be inferred from anything in PON to date, but seems to be clear foreshadowing of future events.

Also, clear pointers to the fact that the Dunyain are (click to show/hide)going to close the world, given the chance  again foreshadowing TAE.

Are the skin-spies therefore, an analogy for what humanity would become in a closed world, animate, but not truly living?

This also suggests Cnaiur has become a self-moving soul.  Therefore Moenghus and Kellhus have inadvertently achieved the Dunyain mission without realising it - how ironic.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page