Nansur are the most ancient people of the Three Seas, descendants of the Ceneians of near antiquity and the Kyraneans of far antiquity. They live their lives in the shadow of monumental works and so feel compelled to erect monuments” — he opened his hands to the soaring marmoreal vaults — “such as this.”

The great contest between the Emperor and the Great Names of the Holy War had come to a head. Offering Cnaüir as a substitute for Ikurei Conphas, Proyas had petitioned Maithanet to settle the dispute of the Emperor’s Indenture, and Ikurei Xerius III had accordingly invited all the Great Names to plead their case and hear the Shriah’s judgment. They were to meet in his Privy Gardens, sequestered somewhere within the gilded compounds of the Andiamine Heights.

One way or another, the Holy War was about to march on distant Shimeh.

Whether the Shriah sided with the Great Names and ordered the Emperor to provision the Holy War or with the Ikurei Dynasty and ordered the Great Names to sign the Imperial Indenture meant little to Kellhus. Either way it seemed the leaders of the Holy War would have competent counsel. The brilliance of Ikurei Conphas, the Nansur Exalt-General, was grudgingly acknowledged even by Proyas. And the intelligence of Cnaüir, as Kellhus knew first-hand, was beyond question. What mattered was that the Holy War eventually prevail against the Fanim, and bear him to Shimeh.

To his father. His mission.

Is this what you wanted, Father? Is this war to be my lesson?

“I have little patience for these games,” Cnauir said, and although the others heard this as a curious admission, Kellhus knew it to be a warning. This will be his trial, and I’ll be tried through him.

“The game is never over,” Proyas asserted. “The game is without beginning or end.”

Without beginning or end...

Kellhus had been a boy of eleven the first time he heard this phrase.

“The Logos is without beginning or end, young Kellhus. Do you understand this?”

The instruction had begun.

“No, Pragma,” Kellhus replied.

“Thousands of years ago, when the Dunyain first found —”

“After the ancient wars?” Kellhus eagerly interrupted. “When we were still refugees?”

A bee had droned into the shrine, and now it etched drowsy, random circles beneath the vaults.

“You are about to embark, young Kellhus, on the most difficult stage of your Conditioning: the mastery of the legion within. Only by doing this will you be able to survive the Labyrinth.”

“This will answer the question of the Thousand Thousand Halls?”

“No. But it will enable you to ask properly.”

the Privy Garden had been designed, Kellhus understood, to foster intimacy, to move visiting dignitaries with the gift of the Emperor’s confidence. This was a place of simplicity and elegance, the humble heart of the Emperor made earth and stone.

The Lords of the Holy War. All gathered in one place.

The study deepens, Father.

Faces turned and voices fell silent as they approached. Several hailed Proyas, but most stared at Cnauir, emboldened by the open scrutiny of numbers.

“They seem anxious,” Kellhus said.

“And why not?” Proyas replied. “I bring them a Prince who claims to dream of Shimeh and a Scylvendi heathen who could be their general.”

But far more than their drinking, Kellhus knew, had incited the old Earl’s fury.

“And that man,” Proyas continued, daring to point, “in the center of that group wearing masks... Do you see him?”

“Why do they wear masks?”

“The Ainoni are a debauched people,” Proyas replied, casting a wary glance at their immediate vicinity. “A race of mummers. They’re overly concerned with the subtleties of human intercourse. They regard a concealed face a potent weapon in all matters concerning jnan.”

“Jnan,” Cnauir muttered, “is a disease you all suffer.”

Proyas smiled, amused by the relentlessness of the plainsman’s contempt. “Doubtless we do. But the Ainoni suffer it mortally.”

“Forgive me,” Kellhus said, “but just what is ‘jnan’?”

Proyas shot him a puzzled look. “I’ve never pondered it much before,” he admitted. “Byantas, I recall, defines it as ‘the war of word and sentiment.’ But it’s far more. The subtleties that guide the conduct between men, you might say. It’s” — he shrugged — “simply something we do.”

Kellhus nodded. They know so little of themselves, Father.

“A good man,” Kellhus repeated. I need only convince him I’m more holy.

“Let’s pray his interest in you is academic, Scylvendi.”

Cnauir matched Yalgrota’s gaze without blinking. “Yes,” he said evenly, “for his sake. A man is measured by more than his frame.”

Proyas arched his brows, grinned sidelong at Kellhus.

“You think,” Kellhus asked the Scylvendi, “that he’s not as long as he’s tall?”

Proyas laughed aloud, but Cnauir’s ferocious eyes seized Kellhus. Play these fools if you must, Dunyain, but do not play me!

Skaiyelt is no exception in this regard, as far as I can tell — the man can’t speak a word of Sheyic. He’ll need to be... managed, I imagine, but not taken seriously otherwise.”

There’s a great game here, Kellhus thought, and there’s no place for those who don’t know the rules. Nevertheless, he asked, “Why’s that?”

“Cunning fiends,” Proyas muttered under his breath. The Guardsmen yanked the man into sunlight. He wobbled drunkenly, heedless of his exposed phallus. He raised a piteous face to the warmth of the sun. His eyes had been gouged out.

“Who is he?” Kellhus asked.

Cnauir spat, watched the Guardsman chain the man to the base of the Emperor’s bench.

“Xunnurit,” he said after a moment. “Our King-of-Tribes at the Battle of Kiyuth.”

“A token of Scylvendi weakness, no doubt,” Proyas said tightly. “Of Cnauir urs Skiotha’s weakness... Evidence in what will be your trial.”

The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without...

The sun waxed across the disheveled mountainsides, mottling his periphery with the contrast of dark plummets and bright bald faces. Kellhus found himself at war. Inchoate urges reared from nothingness, demanding thought. Unuttered voices untwined from darkness, demanding thought. Hissing images railed, pleaded, threatened — all demanding thought. And through it all:

The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without...

Long afterward, he would realize this exercise had demarcated his soul. The incessant repetition of the Pragma’s proposition had pitted him against himself, had shown him the extent to which he was other to himself. For the first time he could truly see the darkness that had preceded him, and he knew that before this day, he had never truly been awake.

“You have completed your first day, young Kellhus, and now you will continue through the night. When the dawn sun broaches the eastern glacier, you will cease repeating the last word of the proposition but otherwise continue. Each time the sun breaks from the glacier, you will cease repeating the last word.

And the proposition became something drunken, something that stumbled and staggered through a nightmarish chorus of agitations, distractions, and frenzied passions. They howled within him — like something dying.

Any one of these people, he concluded, might be as easily possessed as Leweth had been — despite their fierce pride. But in their sum, they were incalculable.

They were a labyrinth, a thousand thousand halls, and he had to pass through them. He had to own them.

What if this Holy War exceeds my abilities? What then, Father?

“Do you feast, Dunyain?” Cnauir asked in bitter Scylvendi. “Grow fat on faces?” Proyas had left them to confer with Gotian, and for the moment, the two of them were alone.

“We share the same mission, Scylvendi.”

Acting became being.

His other claim, however — his claim to have dreamt of Shimeh and the Holy War — had secured him a far different position, one more fraught with peril and possibility … But all of them conceded Kellhus the same position.

For the peoples of the Three Seas, dreams, no matter how trivial, were a serious matter. Dreams were not, as the Dünyain had thought before Moenghus’s summons, mere rehearsals, ways for the soul to train itself for different eventualities. Dreams were the portal, the place where the Outside infiltrated the World, where what transcended men — be it the future, the distant, the demonic, or the divine — found imperfect expression in the here and now.

By claiming to be less than what he seemed to be, he moved men, even learned men such as Proyas and Achamian, to hope or fear that he might be more.

He would never utter it, never claim it, but he would manufacture the circumstances that would make it seem true. Then all those who counted themselves secret watchers, all those who breathlessly asked “Who is this man?” would be gratified like never before. He would be their insight.

They would be unable to doubt him then. To doubt him would be to think their own insights empty. To disown him would be to disown themselves.
Kellhus would step onto conditioned ground.

So many permutations... But I see the path, Father.

To be premeditated, he knew, was the most galling of insults. In this way even an Emperor might be made a slave — though, Kellhus realized, he did not know why. Finally Xerius settled on the Norsirai posture: hands braced on his knees.

"A different face, among the Counsels... a troubling face. It was the subtlest of incongruities, a vague wrongness, that drew his attention at first. An old man dressed in fine charcoal silk robes, a man obviously deferred to and respected by the others. One of his companions leaned to him and muttered something inaudible through the rumble of voices. But Kellhus could see his lips: Skeaos...

The Counsel’s name.

…

No perceptible blush reflex. Disconnect between heart rate and apparent expression —

But the drone of surrounding voices trailed into silence, and he withdrew, reassembled. The Emperor was about to speak. Words that could seal the fate of the Holy War.

Five heartbeats had passed.

What could this mean? A single, indecipherable face among a welter of transparent expressions. Skeaos... Are you my father’s work?

The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without...

Until he whispered only: The Logos. The Logos. The Logos...

…

When the sun reared yet again, his thoughts receded to a single word:

The. The. The. The...

…

The. The...

A moving soul chained to the brink, to the exquisite moment before something, anything. The tree, the heart, the everything transformed into nothing by repetition, by the endless accumulation of the same refusal to name.

A corona of gold across the high slopes of the glacier.

... and then nothing.

No thought.

“The Empire welcomes you,” Xerius announced, his voice straining to be mild. He drew his gaze across the Great Names of the Men of the Tusk, lingering for a moment on the Scylvendi at Kellhus’s side. He smiled.

“Tell me,” the Emperor said, finding comfort in this petty brutality. “Of what tribe is this one?”

Cnauir seemed unaffected. “This one was of the Akkunihor.”

“‘Was,’ you say? He’s dead to you, I suppose.”

“No. Not dead. He is nothing to me.”

“To break one man is to break nothing, I suppose. It’s too easy to break a man. But to break a people... Surely this is something, no?”

The imperial expression became jubilant when Cnauir failed to reply.

Xerius continued: “My nephew here, Conphas, has broken a people. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. The People of War.”

Again, Cnauir refused to answer. His look, however, was murderous.

“Your people, Scylvendi. Broken at Kiyuth. Were you at Kiyuth, I wonder?”

“I was at Kiyuth,” Cnauir grated.

“Were you broken?”

Silence.

“Were you broken?”

All eyes were now on the Scylvendi.

“I was” — he searched for the proper Sheyic term — “schooled at Kiyuth.”

“And from the Scylvendi, he learned the importance of the gobokzoy, the ‘moment’ — that one must read his enemy from afar and strike at the instant of their unbalance.”

“At Kiyuth, I learned,” he continued, turning his hard eyes upon Conphas, “that war is intellect.”

The shock was plain on the Imperial Nephew’s face, and Kellhus wondered at the force of these words. But too much happened for him to focus on this problem. The air was taut with this contest of Emperor and barbarian.

Now it was the Emperor’s turn to remain silent.

Kellhus understood the stakes of this exchange. The Emperor needed to show the incompetence of the Scylvendi. Xerius had made his Indenture the price of Ikurei Conphas. Like any merchant, Xerius could justify this price only by maligning the wares of his competitors.

“An outrage still!” the Emperor roared. “An army with ten generals? When you founder, and you will, for you know not the cunning of the Kianene, then to whom will you turn? A Scylvendi? In your moment of crisis? Of all the absurdities! It will be a heathen’s Holy War then! Sweet Sejenus, this man’s a Scylvendi,” he cried plaintively, as though to a loved one gone mad. “Does this mean nothing to you fools? He is a blight upon the very earth! His very name is blasphemy! An abomination before the God!”

“You’d speak of outrage to us?” Proyas cried in reply. “You’d school in piety those who’d sacrifice their very lives for the Tusk? What of your iniquities, Ikurei? What of you, who’d make a tool of the Holy War?”

“I would preserve the Holy War, Proyas! Save the God’s instrument from your ignorance!”

“My uncle speaks the truth,” Conphas called out, and a hush fell across the noblemen. The great Conphas had finally spoken. He would be the more sober voice.

“You know nothing of the Scylvendi,” he continued matter-of-factly. “They’re not heathens like the Fanim. Their wickedness isn’t one of distortion, of twisting the true faith into an abomination. They’re a people without gods.”

…

“They call these scars swazond,” he said, as though a patient tutor, “a word that means ‘dyings.’ To us, they are little more than savage trophies, not unlike the shrunken Sranc heads that the Thunyeri stitch onto their shields. But they’re far more to the Scylvendi. Those dyings are their only purpose. The very meaning of their lives is written into those scars. Our dyings... Do you understand this?”

He looked into the faces of the assembled Inrithi, was satisfied by the apprehension he saw there. It was one thing to admit a heathen into their midst; it was quite another to have the details of his wickedness enumerated.

Conphas looked to Proyas.

“Ask him, Proyas. Ask him what moves his soul.”

As a child, he’d seen expressions in the same manner as world-born men, as something understood without understanding. But now he could see the joists beneath the planks of a man’s expression, and because of this, he could calculate, with terrifying exactitude, the distribution of forces down to a man’s foundation.

But this Skeaos baffled him. Where he saw through others, he saw only the mimicry of depth in the old man’s face. The nuanced musculature that produced his expression was unrecognizable — as though moored to different bones.

This man had not been trained in the manner of the Dunyain. Rather, his face was not a face.

Moments passed, incongruities accumulated, were classified, cobbled into hypothetical alternatives...

Limbs. Slender limbs folded and pressed into the simulacrum of a face.

Kellhus blinked, and his senses leapt back into their proper proportion. How was this possible? Sorcery? If so, it possessed nothing of the strange torsion he’d experienced with the Nonman he’d battled so long ago. Sorcery, Kellhus had realized, was inexplicably grotesque — like the scribblings of a child across a work of art — though he did not know why. All he knew was that he could distinguish sorcery from the world and sorcerers from common men. This was among the many mysteries that had motivated his study of Drusas Achamian.

This face, he was relatively certain, had nothing to do with sorcery. But then how?

What is this man?

The study deepens, Father. Always it deepens.

“As a youth,” Proyas was saying, “I was tutored by a Mandate Schoolman, Conphas. He’d say you’re rather optimistic about the Scylvendi.”

Several laughed openly at this — relieved.

“Mandate stories,” Conphas said evenly, “are worthless.”

“Perhaps,” Proyas replied, “but of a par with Nansur stories.”

“But that’s not the question, Proyas,” old Gothyelk said, his accent so thick that his Sheyic was barely comprehensible. “The question is, how can we trust this heathen?”

Proyas turned to the Scylvendi at his side, suddenly hesitant.

“Then what of it, Cnauir?” he asked.

Throughout the exchange, Cnauir had remained silent, doing little to conceal his contempt. Now he spat in Conphas’s direction.

No thought.

The boy extinguished. Only a place. This place.

The old man’s left hand forsook his right sleeve, bearing a watery knife. And like a rope in water, his arm pitched outward, fingertips trailing across the blade as the knife swung languidly into the air, the sun skating and the dark shrine plunging across its mirror back...

And the place where Kellhus had once existed extended an open hand — the blond hairs like luminous filaments against tanned skin — and grasped the knife from stunned space.
The slap of pommel against palm triggered the collapse of place into little boy. The pale stench of his body. Breath, sound, and lurching thoughts.

I have been legion...

…

Now I understand.

“You would sound me,” Cnauir said at length. “Make clear the riddle of the Scylvendi heart. But you use your own hearts to map mine. You see a man abased before you, Xunnurit. A man bound to me by kinship of blood. What an offence this must be, you say. His heart must cry for vengeance. And you say this because your heart would so cry. But my heart is not your heart. This is why it is a riddle to you.”

“Xunnurit is not a name of shame to the People. It is not even a name. He who does not ride among us is not us. He is other. But you, who mistake your heart for mine — who see only two Scylvendi, one broken, one erect — think he must still belong to me. You think his degradation is my own, and that I would avenge this. Conphas would have you think this. Why else would Xunnurit be among us? What better way to discredit the strong man than by making a broken man his double? Perhaps it is the Nansur heart that should be sounded.”

“None of this is to the point!” Conphas cried.

He lies, Kellhus realized. They knew the Vulgar Holy War would be destroyed. They wanted it to be destroyed... Suddenly Kellhus understood that the outcome of this debate was in fact paramount to his mission. The Ikureis had sacrificed an entire host in order to strengthen their claim over the Holy War. What further disaster would they manufacture once it became an inconvenience?

“The question,” Conphas ardently continued, “is whether you can trust a Scylvendi to lead you against the Kianene!”

“But that isn’t the question,” Proyas countered. “The question is whether we can trust a Scylvendi over you.”

“But how could this even be an issue?” Conphas implored. “Trust a Scylvendi over me?” He laughed harshly. “This is madness!”

“It’s the God’s land, Ikurei,” Proyas said cuttingly. “The very land of the Latter Prophet. Or would you put the pathetic annals of Nansur before the Tractate? Before our Lord, Inri Sejenus?”

Conphas remained silent for a moment, gauging these words. One did not, Kellhus realized, lightly enter a contest of piety with Nersei Proyas.

“And who are you, Proyas, to ask this question?” Conphas returned, rallying his earlier calm. “Hmm? You who would put a heathen — a Scylvendi, no less! — before Sejenus.”

“We are all instruments of the Gods, Ikurei. Even a heathen — a Scylvendi, no less — can be an instrument, if such is the God’s will.”

“Would we guess at God’s will, then? Eh, Proyas?”

“That, Ikurei, is Maithanet’s task.” Proyas turned to Gotian, who had been watching them keenly all this time. “What does Maithanet say, Gotian? Tell us. What says the Shriah?”

“I would ask the Scylvendi,” Gotian said, clearing his voice, “why he has come.”

Cnaüir looked hard at the Shrial Knight, at the Tusk embroidered in gold across his white vestment. The words are in you, Scylvendi. Speak them.

“I have come,” Cnauir said at length, “for the promise of war.”

“Do not mistake me, Inrithi. In this much Conphas is right. You are all staggering drunks to me. Boys who would play at war when you should kennel with your mothers. You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.”

“You have offered me war, and I have accepted. Nothing more. I will not regret your losses. I will not bow my head before your funeral pyres. I will not rejoice at your triumphs. But I have taken the wager. I will suffer with you. I will put Fanim to the sword, and drive their wives and children to the slaughter. And when I sleep, I will dream of their lamentations and be glad of heart.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Gothyelk, the old Earl of Agansanor, said, “I’ve ridden on many campaigns. My bones are old, but they’re my bones still, not the fire’s. And I’ve learned to trust the man who hates openly, and to fear only those who hate in secret. I’m satisfied with this man’s answer — though I like it little.” He turned to Conphas, his eyes narrow with distrust. “It’s a sad thing when a heathen schools us in honesty.”

Slowly, this assent was echoed by others.

“Now, I can vouch for the honor of Cnauir urs Skiotha, but then who would vouch for me? So let’s assume that both men, Emperor and Chieftain, are equally untrustworthy. Given this, the answer lies in something you already know: we undertake the God’s work, but it’s dark and bloody work nonetheless. There is no fiercer labor than war.” He studied their faces, glancing at each as though he stood with him alone. They stood upon the brink, he could see, on the cusp of the conclusion reason itself had compelled. Even Xerius.

“Whether we accept the stewardship of the Emperor or the Chieftain,” he continued, “we concede the same trust, and we concede the same labor...”

Kellhus paused, looked to Gotian. He could see the inferences move of their own volition through the man’s soul.

“But with the Emperor,” Gotian said, nodding slowly, “we concede the wages of our labor as well.”

A murmur of profound agreement passed through the Men of the Tusk.

“Ikurei Xerius III, Emperor of Nansur, by authority of the Tusk and the Tractate, and according to the ancient constitution of Temple and State, you are ordered to provision the instrument of our great —”

The handsome face of Ikurei Xerius III then turned to him, as terrified as it was enraged.

He thinks I’m party to his Counsel’s treachery. He wishes to seize me but can think of no pretext.

Kellhus turned to Cnauir, who stood stoically, studying the naked form of his kinsman chained beneath the Emperor’s feet. “We must leave quickly,” Kellhus said. “There has been too much truth here.”

We have paraded through the streets, we have invaded temples - spent weeks and months storing energy for this day of personal ritual. Those persons who measure their lives in the monetary bumps they snort from consumer culture laugh as gods while the world bows in orthodoxy.

Merry Christmas,
Happy Constitution Day,
Malkh,
Quaid-e-Azam,
Takanakuy,
Happy Kwanzaa,
and Happy Hanukkah...

Cheers all. Celebrate life !

Where did I put that TSA christmas poem...
aha
All credit to Sil-Inchor from the 3seas forum

Twas the Night Before the Second Apocalypse.

Twas just after the womb-plague
And all through the manse
Not a Nonman was stirring
Not even their prince.
The chorae were hung
By the chimney with care
In hopes that the Carapace
Soon would be there.

The sranc were all nestled
Up snug in their beds
Visions of obscenity
Dancing in their heads
When up on Earwa
There arose such a clatter
The violent arrival
Of Man’s Darkest Hour

Away to the windows
The Mandate did fly
They threw open the shutters
Light poured from their eyes
And what did their dream-blearied orbs
There perceive
But a towering storm shouting
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
With a nimil sarcophagus
So shiny and dread
They knew that slain Lokung
Was no longer Dead.

More rapid than eagles
The Consult they came
And He bellowed and gibbered
And screamed out their names

ON SKAFRA, ON GLORTMUND, ON HALGYS AND AURAX
ON BLODMYR, ON THREKLA, ON LYRNYR AND AURANG

TO THE NAIL HIGH IN HEAVEN
TO THE GODS THERE OUTSIDE
ON WRACU, ON BASHRAG, TO RUIN WE RIDE

So up to the skies
His legions they flew
Man-Traitors and skin-spies
The last Inchoroi, too

The Mandate, despairing
Could not stay aloof
They burned in the fires
Of the great Mog-Pharau

The Men of the Three Seas
Were soon overthrown
Their hearthstones all cracked
And their great kings dethroned
The Shriah was headless
The Emperor dead.
‘Twas the Second Apocalypse
The prophets all said

But remember, dear children
That though the No-God would fell us
If things really turn ugly
We can all trust in Kellhus

Willem suggested this thread to consolidate fan resources on and off the forum. I've updated this post to include an extra-plethora of redundant links.

1. There is a sticky'd thread with a link to all Cu'jara Cinmoi's posts. At this point, I'm not personally going to take the time to transcribe Bakker's Zombies Three Seas posts. Everyone is welcome to pollute that thread with their favorites. That includes any aphorisms that anyone would like to share. Eventually that thread can earn the title curated like lockesnow suggested. [It actually became its own thread: Curated Sayings].

2. lockesnow was kind enough to consolidate the epigrams from all the books for us. In every book subforum [WLW, TJE, TTT,
TWP, TDTCB] there is a sticky'd thread. I'm working on consolidating TPB's aphorisms and the new ones Bakker's been doing over social media: [This has been done within Curated Sayings]. Truth Shines, I believe, and Wilshire also got the Wikiquote project off the hop and everyone is welcome to partake in those threads (again, sticky'd by subforum [WLW, TJE, TTT, TWP, TDTCB].

3. I'm not sure what qualifies as critical responses - I have a list of Interviews & Articles that I'd consolidated over the years. lockesnow still has a few - referenced in other threads - where Bakker has some quality commentary on people's responses and reviews. Anyone is welcome to add any links to anything qualifying as relating to Bakker but also not an Interview & Article, like reviews, responses, commentary.

4. Fan Resources:
There's The Prince of Nothing Wiki.
The aforementioned Wikiquote: The Second Apocalypse, R. Scott Bakker.
Three Pound Brain - Bakker's Blog.
Many, many threads on Westeros Literature forum [enumerated by book titles and roman numerals. They are a couple odd threads out - as our speculation was and is insatiable - but you can ask around there for those or search the history for Bakker and other keywords.

5. Everyone is welcome to and encouraged to participate in The Almanac [Nearing the end of TDTCB!]. All I can ask, at this point, is that people participate in the forum at large as they can - we all have unique lives.

Also, please add anything that would qualify as a resource that I've missed.

EDIT:

Zombie Three-Seas - The Resurrected Read-Only version of Three-Seas forum, a forum for the Second Apocalypse which was finally overwhelmed by Spam Sranc after the release of TJE.

Summary of Where We Left Off: The Unholy Consult