21 KiB
[RT][HF] A Practical Guide to Evil: Book 4: Chapter 27: Into Dusk
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Author: u/Zayits *
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URL: https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/chapter-27-into-dusk/
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Score: 66
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Created: 2018-07-06T04:12:51
Post:
Comments:
u/cyberdsaiyan [+16] (an hour later)
Well this isn't going as straightforwardly as I expected.
We might find out how exactly incubi and the denizens of hell are formed soon.
u/Frommerman [+15] (2 hours later)
Huh. So Tikoloshe was involved in the war for Keter?
I wonder which side he fought for.
u/cyberdsaiyan [+11] (5 hours later)
Lycaonese I presume, since he was part of the iron men and had an iron necklace.
u/SamuraiMackay [+12] (7 hours later)
Presumably that is the previously mentioned Witch Queen who first summoned him. Not for certain but it would certainly line up with what we know.
u/Zayits [+11] (6 hours later)
I’d been taught at the orphanage the reason for the existence of the ‘Nameless Kingdom’ was likely a demon of Absence, or that the Miezans had used a Censure after facing entrenched resistance. The latter theory wasn’t all that popular, since they were known to have use that only a handful of times across the entire lifespan of their empire.
I smell foreshadowing. It's heavily hinted that it's a ritual of some sort, and if the comparison with the demon of Absence is any indication, it has the same memory-damaging side effects, along with some devastating main effect. The focus is different from that of Absence, though, since all the uses of those demons mentioned (the disappearance of the Yan Tei empire, the Ninth Crusade, the Hell Egg in Harrow) were hypothetical or implied. Censure, meanwhile, is known to have been used, and the structure of the sentence implies it's even rarer than summoning of a demon.
Consider Arcadia as a single object being looked upon by an infinity of perspectives. To every one, it is a different realm. Across the Tyrian Sea, it likely has completely different name and seems inhabited by completely different entities. Even the marriage of Winter and Summer is contained within the span of our gaze only, unlikely to have tremors beyond.
Yesss. I've expressed my concerns about an orphan from a former backwater kingdom making fundamental changes to Creation due to a forced coincidence before, and this explanation is everything I hoped for and more.
He was looking at pale-skinned man in furs, chest mostly bare and his neck covered with necklaces of iron and silver. The stranger Hierophant was staring at was beautiful, I decided. One of the most striking men I’d ever seen. It was like someone had ripped out the fantasy of a warrior consort and given it flesh.
The appearance is not someone Catherine recognizes, so, while Masego uses to refer to Wekesa as father, which, together with the epigraph, might imply some fundamental revelations about souls and the cycle of life in the Guideverse, my money is on the "man" being Tikoloshe. Consider this quote from the extra chapter "Red Skies":
The devil laughed. “I was first called into being when the witch-queen of what you would now call the northern Principate became dissatisfied with her husbands. I was no longer young when the Miezans first came upon the shores of this continent, blown by a storm.”
That is arguably around the period when Dead King was still a mortal ruler called Trismegistus, and given that all of the soldiers come from roughly the same period, if not the exact same moment, it may have been the prelude to his apotheosis. The stone mace breaking an iron sword in a battle of what is obviously two Named might imply sorcerous properties. Given that the Lycaonese are currently attacking, and we saw another city burning plague victims, it wouldn't surprise me if all the events unfolding are happening during the ten-hour hellgate ritual or its prelude: Trismegistus may well have been trying to pull an Amestris even as the Lycaounese invaders were fighting their way to his capital.
“That,” he said, pointing at the man, “is my father.”
By the way, how is he able to recognize him, anyway? The explanation about the scrying ritual earlier in the chapter implied that he had other ways to judge the effectiveness of the spell than listening to the chant he can only recognize the cadence of. Then again, he might have eyeballed that simply by the observation of how they used nothing other that the formula and their own blood, but that leaves the question: how did he know that was Tikoloshe? He might have recognized an old face the incubus had shown him once, though I'm not sure why would he discard the shape Warlock knows him by. Masego could also have recognized the description of the Lycaonese queen (if his father would ever tell him about this battle, I doubt any other details would remain in his memory), but he'd probably mention that she was invading the fledging Dead King. Still, a possibility remains that Hierophant's eyes can glean more about the past than mere sight.
u/Zayits [+7] (6 hours later)
This is a good plase to address another question that has been bothering me for a while: how deliberate was the chain of events that led to the rise of the Dead King? See, Akua mentions in interlude Chiaroscuro that he opened his Greater Breach to spread undeath across what had been his kingdom, but even she implies that Keter turning into what it did was not a planned occurence. What if the whole "undead" business was more of an improvisation than previously assumed?
We know from the order of magnitude of the energy wasted in the course of opening the gate that Trismegistus opened it by himself and not through a group ritual, converting the biggest possible amount of power an individual can. The scrying ritual in this chapter implies that the early Trismegistian sorcery in general relied on skill of individual casters rather than on elements like runes/devils/enchanted items. Thing is, the witch-queen is on the side of Lycaonese here, fighting in close quarters with the other Named, they have the technological advantage and the other side uses rituals to throw lightning bolts. I get that the numbers and iron weapons are on the invaders' side but is magic that ineffective in comparison? Most importantly, this is the fifth battle the Woe are coming by. How come we saw no combat diabolists yet?
Diabolism is, judging by the tidbits we saw so far, the discipline that relies on the individual casters the most. They have practices that prevent mental bleedover from stronger devils, the binding is done by the mages themselves (even to the inanimate objects), and the bindings themselves are called contracts for a reason. We know the mages of Keter knew enough about lesser hells for Trismegistus to open a permanent portal there, and even with the cost, summoning some akalibsa through a temporary one could potentially have at least evened the numbers.
Could they have afforded the cost, though? A sole mage has only so much power in him; even if they have some primitive rituals, the defenders of Keter would need to sacrifice something to call on the devils. The iron queen is evidently a diabolist herself, and her only summon is what, a young succubus? Even for a Named, the kind of power required to summon a devil is not something that just lies around. So where did Trismegistus get it? All battles so far are part of the same campaign, and while the lesser gods like the one in Greywood, the one that Sabah killed to become the Capitain and the cranes of Stygia don't necessarily interact with mortals on regular basis, they wouldn't have caused no effect whatsoever either.
We didn't see any equivalent of Watch or berserkers on either side of the conflict so far, and while the effects of Trismegistus being in the posession of a source of power massive enough to poke a hole in reality may yet show themselves, there are only three unlikely candidates for that role so far: the scrying, the lightning rituals and the plague. Skip the next part if you want, I'm making a lot of assumptions about magic there.
I included the magical rituals here because, well, the only time we saw someone invent what looked like an actual spell was Masego imitating the sun of Summer:
“Glint on glass, stolen yet earned,” he murmured. “Passing jewel, foe’s crown: dawn.”
This clearly references the conclusion of the Battle of Four Armies and One (the theft of fire, the reflection of the sun in his spectacles, and the sun being the crowning attribute of the princess of High Noon). Now, the imitation of a miracle may be Masego's thing (especially the "glint on glass" part), but we know for a fact that there are things like the crown of Tyrant of Helike or the Stairway ritual that are modeled after miracles, so it's a legitimate way to model spells. With that in mind, let's look at the lightning spell as used by Kilian during the melee in book one:
“I am the root and the crown, the source and the flow, the storm and the calm,” she murmured. “Power is purpose, purpose is will. Gods of my mother, take this offering and grant me the wrath of Heaven.”
It's eerily similar to Masego's spell in the sense of how there's clearly some kind of context missing. Still, we can glean some information even from what we see. Both include a mention of usurpation of the power by the caster; the offering mentioned in the second is clearly the smudge of blood she made on her cheek, tough it's not likely to be a sacrifice to the Gods Below: Kilian's spell straight up calls the lightning "the wrath of Heaven", but the "the storm and the calm" suggests that it may be an attribute of a storm-related lesser god, and lightning is"Divine Wrath 101". Besides, it's not like magic can be evil in and of itself: the incantation for creating fire snakes says that their origin comes from "nameless eidolons, thieves of Heaven’s grace", but Hedge Wizard calls them a fancy knockout-punch used by mages in interlude Appellant, not some kind of diabolical construct.
Similarly, visions and omens are another potential gift granted by a god, and even their use as a simple spell is associated with (potentially) divine beings: fae, especially the Wild Hunt, can use them to effectively teleport, and that's before you take into the consideration those of them that are, essentially, lesser gods. Scrying easily could have originated as a prayer to a deity for a divination, and while its spell versions use workarounds such as air-based magical links and pebbles to ground them, a chant and an offering may well have been enough for the divine version.
Finally, plague is another traditional way for a god to express their displeasure. This is less straightforward than the other options, since the plague was killing Trismegitus' own subjects, but there are several possibilities here:
The deity causing the plague was hostile and/or not native to the kingdom of Keter. Remember, if Trismegistus had indeed planned the ritual from the very start, sacrificing an entire god that was benevolent to him (or at least that he could control enough to sacrifice it in the first place) would be dumb. Given that all the shards so far show the same invasion, we can guess that it happened around the same time as the gate was opened, so we may well be looking at another Akua's Folly, only the god in question wasn't artificial and so had more will to actively struggle against its bindings.
Another possibility (the one I was leading to all this time) is that the future Dead King had the god curse his own subjects. The man's endgame was turning all his subject into undead, and zombie plagues are a thing, so it's not outside the realm of the impossible. Besides, while Catherine didn't mention any zombies in the shards she saw, she didn't mention any details about the plagued city either. The deity could well have punished the invaders once they moved to occupy the city, though I'm going to explain why I don't find this possibility to be likely either.
Most of the magic- and god-related speculation ends here. Tl;dr: if there are traces of the kind of entity that Trismegistus would have to sacrifice to open a Greater Breach, Catherine hasn't encountered any so far.
u/Zayits [+4] (6 hours later)
Now, back to the power issue.
My theory is that the plague is no coincidence, but very much a means to an end. The ruler of Keter had to face an invasion of a numerically superior and better armed force with only an insufficient advantage in magic without power to achieve something truly great with it, so he leaned into that advantage as far as he could. This is my first guess: that the Dead King didn't open a portal to hell to turn all his subjects into undead - he killed all his subjects to open the portal to hell.
Remember, while he's a skilled enough diabolist (enough to bind demons and to know that there are undeath-related lesser hells, at least), this chapter's epigraph and quotes from his (only?) published book in general heavily hint that his speciality during his life was undeath, which led into his current Name. Despite that, we've seen no zombie troops deployed yet, even though that would lower the casualties of his own soldiers. There's no way he would fight another practitioner Named and not rely on his speciality - the one that would later make him a legend - especially if no other weapon at his disposal could turn the tide.
Regardless, if he indeed had to use some sort of improvised human sacrifice - be it an unleashed plague or simply all the people slain over the course of the war - to power his ritual, then my second guess is that the opening of the Greater Breach and the subsequent invasion of a hell are a measure of desperation, not his preferred outcome. Akua stated that it took him ten hours to open the portal, while the invasion would take months. Given that those would have to happen in short order, and are simply too massive twists of Fate to be unrelated, I'm assuming that the hellgate was opened at the conclusion of the campaign. Like, say, when he was finally out of army, the enemy was at the gates of Keter, and he had nothing to pit against the forces that were about to stomp all over his face.
Granted, the result may have been entirely acceptable for him, but my point is that even if he planned the ending to this invasion to happen as it did, that this kind of escalation would be the only way for him to turn the tide, magically superior lich or not. The invasion of a hell also makes very little sense unless he botched its making in some way, since all the devils that would come into Creation would also be bound to his will, which leaves no functional difference between owning the gate (which he did as of moment he finished the ritual) and owning the hell (which cost him untold amounts of troops, resources, and crippled both his ability to come into Creation and his cognition).
My third guess is that the whole "trapped in hell forever" deal isn't an accident either, nor is it an acceptable consequence which he foresaw. Normally the kind of event that took place here would see a band of heroes rushing in to prevent it. Unless it was an entirely accidental "how do i into hell" by some bumbling comic relief, which Trismegistus wasn't, the Heavens would send a champion at least to the final confrontation. Akua's Folly is a notable exception, since a) while Fate had provided a conflict fitting an event such as an opening of a hellgate, it was entirely between villains (like here, because a diabolst queen that changes husbands like gloves doesn't look particularly Good to me), and b) because it was a Bard's plot all along, down to stopping the Good elves from preventing the whole thing.
But here's the rub - what if Gods Above, despite not stopping the Greater Breach from happening, got to intervene afterwards? Due to the nature of hells, a portal into one effectively means infinite armies for its owner - a disturbance in the balance like none before. Unless, of course, the villain in question is in a position that doesn't allow for such usage of it. For example, if he himself, baited by a heroine, crossed the boundary and is now trapped inside at the cost of her life - and the Fate would help her, too! This is my theory on how Bard was created: she was reborn in her current form after tricking or banishing the Dead King, and serves as an opposite of his. She, too, cannot intervene directly by the nature of her Role, but has a form of immortality and an ability to change appearances between incarnations. That would also imply that the Dead King's influence stretches further than seems at the first glance, but as to how I have no clue.
u/None [+4] (7 hours later)
A lot of people assume that the Dead King was a reaction to the Bard, but I think your theory fits better.
Most people assume the Bard was first because they've seen "Heaven put their hands on the scale more", but that's because Heaven is losing for the time period of this story.
u/cyberdsaiyan [+1] (11 hours later)
This explains a lot of things, but in that case, Catherine meeting with the Dead King would probably be the time that bard suddenly appears in front of the Saint of Swords and whispers "good stuff" in her ears to ruin all the plans. And that means that Bard is ultimately the antagonist of this book at least, if not the whole story.
u/Zayits [+3] (12 hours later)
I don't think Catherine would be opposing the Bard just yet, but then again I don't think she's going to immediately summon the Dead King either. She can't afford him running around with both her and her enemies unprepared, though I wonder what she can bargain with other than the summoning itself.
u/Law_Student [+2] (a day later)
It really depends on what the Dead King wants. Does he want out? If he wants out, how far 'out' does he want? Would he be happy carving out a little kingdom for himself, or would he need to conquer Procer?
u/Zayits [+2] (a day later)
Yeah, while the exposition happening now suggests some sort of connection between his objectives as king of Keter and the current ones, there seems to be none foreshadowed so far. Which is strange, given that most villains are defined by how they think world should be (as opposed to how it actually works).
u/Nic_Cage_DM [+1] (a day later)
By the way, how is he able to recognize him, anyway?
Dudes got wizard eyes, he can see loads of crazy shit
u/Agnoman [+7] (a day later)
“Oh, things are going badly,” she mocked in a high-pitched voice. “Better stab my way out of it. But stabbing is bad, for some inexplicable reason. What a difficult dilemma.”
Honestly, this hits a little too close to home.
But this:
Consider Arcadia as a single object being looked upon by an infinity of perspectives. To every one, it is a different realm.
is really goddamn cool. That's some neat worldbuilding.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+6] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (32 minutes later)
Huh? Is Masego time displaced from a shaman? If so, the more religious parts (little a aspects) of his role now make more sense.
u/RespectTheMidget [+34] (44 minutes later)
Not his father the Warlock, his other father the millennia old incubus.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (6 hours later)
He is adopted, but I see what you mean, and that I missed.
u/xland44 [+6] (9 hours later)
Masego is adopted? didn't the warlock create him with magic or whatever?
u/ahd1903 [+10] Neo-Victorian New Atlantis (9 hours later)
Adopted.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+8] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (11 hours later)
“I don’t remember my life from before my fathers adopted me,” he admitted. “My first memories are of playing in a sprawling garden under a warm sun, tripping in a pile of daffodils.”
u/None [-1] (9 hours later)
yeah, But I Think the Incubus made the role of the mother and was the one that carried him