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Messages - H

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2866
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin
« on: April 22, 2015, 03:32:32 pm »
In thinking more, I think there is a definite limit on what we can mine from this story.  So far, what I have gleaned is:

Cinial'jin kills his wife and doughter, seemingly over the womb-plague, leading credence to idea that the Womb-Plague did not kill explicitly.

There is an issue of Ishriol parentage, but I can't tell if this is something general, or something Aisarinqu says to goad him, or just an overall fact of Ishriol life (or life post-Womb-Plague).

There is the the theme of burning as a punishment.  This raises the question of what it means to be "half-burned" as Par’sigiccas appears.  Leading us not just to the question of who that is, but why does he appear with Skafra?

From there, we are presented a parallel between Conphas rescuing Cinial'jin and Cu’jara Cinmoi having done so in the past.  Saved him from who's punishment though?  I think the parallel sets us up to believe the both have saved him from the punishment for his daughter's murder.  Perhaps the crowd here is the general populace of Non-men then?  Perhaps this is what it means that Cu'jara Cinmoi is a tyrantm that he opposed popular will in order to "end" the Womb-Plague?

There are some themes I can't really figure though, like what the Way of the Upright Kings is or who is Lord Mountain.  Additionally, the involvement of Cinial'jin's sister's repeated manta, "she hated fear more" and the line "papa hates that he is my image" I don't really have an understanding of.

I don't know that there are answers in the text though...

2867
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin
« on: April 22, 2015, 10:14:27 am »
There seems to be anecdotal evidence that perhaps they realized that from the earliest of days.  It seems memory has always been an issue, even before they were made immortal, in this story we're told, "I must… I must remember. Even before the coming of the Flesh Angels, the Inchoroi, they [the Non-Men] live lives long enough for children to become strangers."

I would guess that in those days, it was a sort of "dirty secret" but one that could probably be swept under the rug to an extent.  Immortality multiplied that problem near infinitely.


2868
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin
« on: April 21, 2015, 02:40:57 pm »
I think "you are my map. My chart" is implying something about her death allowing him to recall, and likely further cement, his memory of killing is daughter/wife. A map for navigating memory lane. Seems they need to repeat atrocities to remember old ones.

Indeed, it does seem that way, yet it is Cu’jara Cinmoi who seems to be saying it, meaning he too murdered his own wife and daughter?

I think the parallel between Conphas and Cu’jara Cinmoi is clear, I'd guess perhaps the former saving him from burning now is clearly drawn to frame something like the latter saving him from the "burning" of the Inverse Fire?

2869
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin
« on: April 21, 2015, 01:51:03 pm »
Thanks for that H. I might go through and cut/paste each part into a continuous unit, wonder if that will help or make it worse... I'm sure the context of the memory is important, so maybe keeping them combined buy flowing in different colors like you have is the best way.

My first thought was the same, to cut it apart, but it think your realization is the same as I had too, that the context of the "now" must have some bearing on the "then."  Then again, maybe that's the trap.

Things I noticed in doing this was, first, that it seems he beats his wife to death, "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 "The white spark of some faraway light refracts in her tears, so that her contrition seems holy, and his embittered and profane. A wondering instant, before the wrath seizes his fists anew."  Does she goad him into it maybe?

Also, there is this very odd seeming scene: "“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. What Siöl requests Siöl compels! The Cun is a code of tyrants. When I stretch forth my hand, you shall be its shadow."

2870
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin
« on: April 20, 2015, 08:19:10 pm »
So, the above is my attempt to disentangle the story.

As far as I can tell, the story breaks down into the following parts:

Black: The "now" his burning and tourture.
Red: The murder (killing?) of his daughter and wife(?).
Blue: The Battle at Inniür-Shigogli, the “Black Furnace Plain.”.
Purple: A visit from Skafra (?).
Orange: his memory of the murder of a little girl, in his attempt to remember his daughter. A visit with Cu’jara Cinmoi (?).
Green: A visit with Cu’jara Cinmoi at the apparent ruins of some mansion.

I have no doubt missed something, but perhaps this can begin to help us understand the story better.

2871
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin
« on: April 20, 2015, 08:14:37 pm »
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 Siöl 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 Siöl, 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 Siöl? “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 Cûn 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–

 
[EDIT: Inflections added, a couple lines colored where I felt I had missed something. More edits, some lines changed to the present.]

2872
General Earwa / Re: TSACast (SA Podcast)
« on: April 10, 2015, 05:38:34 pm »
Oh, and, H, thanks but that's not it either :).

My search-fu is out of gas, not sure which part it would be then,  :(

2873
General Earwa / Re: TSACast (SA Podcast)
« on: April 10, 2015, 03:39:09 pm »
Thanks but no, it's not that one. Hmm... it actually might be Eskeles Scrying the Ordeal after they get ahead of the Ten-Yoke Legion and are being chased by it instead (if that's a scene). I'm looking for the description of the Ordeal as fighting squares beneath the Swayal.

It might be this, although I couldn't pin-point exactly:

Quote
The Men of the Middle-North raised their shields and spears against them.
So did the Horde crash against the Army of the Middle-North. The dead could scarce fall, so packed, so violent was the melee. Men grimacing in thrusting panic. Nonman faces squealing and snapping. Sranc, crushed by the heave of their countless brothers. Sranc, their every bestial instinct bent to ferocity. Men cringed from their eye-blink speed, gasped against their gut-twisting stink: the rot of fish mongers clothed in fecal rags.
But the Shining Men stood their stubborn ground. Heavily armoured, stout of heart, and mighty of limb, they knew that flight would be their destruction. Torrents of arrows and javelins blackened the deranged vista, falling upon the ranks in a soundless clatter, but only those foolish enough to raise their faces were wounded or killed. Heeding the lessons of the ancients, they fought in deep phalanxes, arrayed so that those forward could brace their backs or shoulders against the shields of those behind, so that the entire formation must be clawed like a burr from world's hair before moving. The Galeoth and Tydonni wielded their thrusting spears and nansuri, short-swords designed for close-quarters fighting, to great effect, stabbing at the abominations pinioned against their shields. The Thunyeri, who were weaned on the blood of Sranc, used the hatchets long favoured by their fathers.
The host's bowmen maintained their positions immediately behind the common line, loosing shaft after shaft on shallow arcs over the heads of their countrymen. All of them, even the famed Agmundrmen, fired blind, knowing their arrows killed and yet despairing the insignificance of their toll.
For the knights and thanes stranded on their ponies behind the common line, it seemed a kind of mad performance, like those staged by the great troupes of dancers who frequented the courts of kings. For weeks they had skirmished with the Sranc, had grinned the pulse-pounding grin of the chase and kill. But now they could only watch in astonished frustration, for the Sranc had swallowed the very ground they would ride. Hundreds abandoned their mounts, hoping to shoulder their way to the fore of their men-at-arms, but the Judges stayed them with threats of doom and damnation, reminded them of the Aspect-Emperor and his Martial Prohibitions. For each phalanx was a kind of abacus, and each man a bead bound by strict rules of substitution.
Earl Hirengar of Canute spurned the Judges. He was one of those belligerent souls who could not abide watching while his lessers fought, let alone consider the consequences of his acts. When the Judges tried to seize him, he killed two and grievously injured a third. Then, because no signal could be heard above the clamour, he rode unopposed into the phalanx of his countrymen with his thanes in grim tow. His company managed to hack their way some thirty yards beyond the common line, great-bearded Tydonni, their mouths howling inaudible war-cries, their swords and axes swinging on wild arcs. But the Sranc engulfed them, climbed the backs of their brothers, leapt to tackle the hapless knights. Hirengar himself was dragged from his saddle by the beard. Death came swirling down.
Dismayed and disorganized, his kinsmen faltered. But even as panic leapt like wildfire among them, four Nuns floated above, their billows flaring golden, their sorcerous mutter fluting through the ringing deafness. Hanging as high as treetops, they decimated the Sranc with scythes of crackling light, and so provided the Canutishmen a desperate respite.
Wherever Men faltered, the Swayali witches were there above them, their silk billows cupping the light of their dread dispensations, glowing like jellyfish in the deep. Their mouths flashing lanterns. Their hands working looms of killing incandescence. After the initial shock, the Men of the Middle-North embraced their training, realizing with a kind of wonder that this was what they had prepared for all along. How to yield ten paces whenever the dead piled too high. How to draw their own wounded and dead through their line. Even how to fight the sky, for in their frenzy, the Sranc would claw across the backs and shoulders of their brothers and leap over the forward ranks.
Battle became a kind of dread harvest. Sranc died burning. Sranc died punctured and trampled. Sranc died scratching at shields. Yet they came and they came, surging beneath the witches and their comb of brilliant destruction, a shrieking chorus that wetted ears with blood. Men who faltered for exhaustion rotated with men from the rearward ranks. Soon gored figures could be seen stumbling behind the common lines, crying out for water, for bandages, or simply crashing to the dust. The Judges paced the line, their gilded Circumfixes held high, their mouths working about exhortations no one could hear. Hell itself seemed to churn but a keel away. And they wondered that mere Men could hold such wickedness at bay.

Thats before the scrying though, late in Chapter 7.

2874
General Earwa / Re: TSACast (SA Podcast)
« on: April 10, 2015, 02:22:09 pm »
- If someone with WLW could provide me with quotes about the 'military squares' in the First Battle of the Horde; I think it's an omnipresent war POV, not Sorweel's POV as I said in episode.

Is this what you're referring to?

Quote
What Sorweel had feared had come to pass: the Scions had in fact stumbled across a Sranc host shadowing the Great Ordeal. They only glimpsed it a few times, from what rare heights the landscape provided: a column of vast squares marching in perfect formation. Twice Eskeles had cast an air-bending spell that allowed them to scry the host in greater detail. While others busied themselves counting heads, Sorweel watched with breathless wonder: the tiny figures become liquid and large, executing soundless errands utterly oblivious to the Scions and their sorcerous observation.

I haven't had a chance to listen to the cast, so I don't understand the context, but there are other references to men fighting in squares in other places too.

2875
General Earwa / Re: TSACast (SA Podcast)
« on: April 10, 2015, 12:08:33 pm »

- If someone with TJE could provide me with quotes about Nonmen being unable to see paintings and a description of the fallen chandeliers in Cil-Aujas.

I think these are what you were looking for.

Quote
"Everything..." she said in a wistful tone. Her eyes seemed to track the passage of ghosts.

"Everything what?"

"The walls... The ceilings. Everywhere, limbs and people cut out of stone—images atop images... Think of the toil!"

"It wasn't always such. The Wolf Gate is an example of how they once adorned their cities. It was only when they began forgetting that they turned to this... this... excess. These are their annals, the accounting of their deeds—great and small."

"Then why not simply paint murals the way we do?"

Achamian found himself approving of this question—another long-dead habit, tingling back to life. "Nonmen can't see paintings," he said with an old man's shrug.

A frowning smile. Despite the anger that always seemed to roll about the nethers of her expression, her skeptical looks always managed to promise a fair accounting.

"It's true," Achamian said. "Paintings are naught but gibberish to their eyes. The Nonmen may resemble us, Mimara, but they are far more different than you can imagine."

"You make them sound frightening."

Quote
The ruined cemetery of Cil-Aujas.

Great ribs and sockets of living stone ravined the ceiling. Hanging from its contours, hundreds of ancient chains cluttered the open reaches, some broken midway to the floor, others still bearing the bronze lantern wheels that had once served as illumination. The floors beneath stretched for what seemed a mile, white with illumination and dust, puckered and furrowed by the long wandering lines of ancient dead. In the distances behind and to either side of the company, walls had been hewn from the scarped confusion, gaining heights easily as great as any of Carythusal's famed towers. Tombs pocked them, row upon row of black holes framed with graven script and images, lending them a wasp-nest malignancy. Immediately before the company, however, the enormous sheaves of debris continued climbing and climbing, sloping up to the very ceiling... Some kind of catastrophic collapse.

Sorry, my page numbers are all jacked up, but both quotes are in the latter half of Chapter 14.

2876
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Knife of Many Hands [Spoilers]
« on: April 02, 2015, 03:16:27 pm »
That's what I thought, but I'm still not sure how the fires of damnation (the punishment) are analogous to a 'whore's tongue' in Carythusal. Seems to me that Bakker is bending over backwards to insert the word whore in everything.

Well, he brings about an interesting parallel, in that damnation in the afterlife is torment, yet damnable acts in life are often pleasurable.

2877
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Knife of Many Hands [Spoilers]
« on: April 02, 2015, 10:52:35 am »
Don't have the whole story with me to check the context, but I believe it could that he is saying that in this place, the damning fire's caress is that of a whore's tongue.

Perhaps rephrased as, here damnation takes it's physical form not as fire but as the caress of wonton sexuality.  That is a pretty loaded analogy but I don't have the time to unpack all of it now.

Or something like that.  Smarter people can probably come up with some better interpretations. 

2878
General Earwa / Re: The Womb-Plague (A new theory, perhaps?)
« on: March 20, 2015, 03:18:17 pm »
Personally I think the discovery of sorcery was a big clue.

I would tend to agree, but the fact that their Arc crashed into Earwa makes me want to belive that they knew it was the promised land from the start. Would be terribly inconvenient if they lost 99% of their population and rendered their spaceship inoperable on a planet that wasn't Eden. Would slow them down immensely if that was there strategy every time, and then they just rebuilt the ship and repopulated before moving on.

I think so too.  Perhaps the reason it crashed is that it was never made to enter the atmosphere.  It only made landfall because they knew this would be the last stop.

However, if they knew that before they landed, why didn't they know it on any of the other worlds?  Or perhaps they didn't know what to look for, but when they finally saw it, they knew.

2879
Atrocity Tales / Re: The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin
« on: March 19, 2015, 02:13:16 pm »
I think we have criminally under-looked this story, mainly because it's stream-of-consciousness narrative makes it difficult to follow.

I think there are hints at the true nature of the "Womb-Plague," something of a dark revelation about Cu’jara Cinmoi, the questions of who are the Man that is there with Skafra and Par’sigiccas, and who is the cherished daughter?

2880
General Earwa / Re: The Womb-Plague (A new theory, perhaps?)
« on: March 18, 2015, 09:00:19 pm »
Yeah Aurang has some thoughts like this in one of his POV segments, about how they might have won everything if not for Sil's impatience. I wonder if this is hindsight or not though. I mean Sil was presumably "King-After-the-Fall" for a reason, and Aurang was young at the time. For all we know, Aurang is older now than Sil was when he ordered the attack. Depends on how long the Inchoroi had been purging worlds.

Yeah, impossible to know, but of course Aurang has the advantage of being alive to have hindsight, haha.  It certainly seems logical though, that they honestly should not have come out of the Ark until they knew exactly what to expect.

Aurang and Aurax weren't all that was left after Pir-Pahal though. There were many Inchoroi afterwards, despite their losses. And I don't think we really have much reason to think that the Inchoroi were actively trying to convert Nonmen, or that everything was going to plan before the Breaking of the Gates...since they'd already pretty much lost by that point, being down to two individuals hiding/hibernating somewhere in the Ark.

I misspoke, what I meant was they might be the two highest "rank" Inchoroi left.  We know that Aurang was pretty close to a second to Sil, being his Spear-Bearer and all.  We know nothing of Aurax though.

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