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Bakker XXXVIII: Where The Posters Are Damned


Madness

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I always thought Wracu must be of the Few.
 
I mean these things were supposed to destroy mages, a decent Mandati could wreck a battle tank IMO so I expect the Wracu to have some sort of offensive battle technique or to need "magic" to tether them to their bodies.
 
It's not entirely clear Wutteat is even mortal.


Yep. If we think of dragons as at least partially magic creatures (i.e. tekne + quya hybrid) the chorae problem is solved.
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Well, Akka says "dragons are as immortal as Nonmen." I am guessing Wutteät would be included in that.

Another option for why they can't use Chorae, but not be of the Few, is that they actually have Wards set on them. If one could set a Ward on a place, why not on a thing?
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If what wutteat says is true - and there is a lot of reason to think otherwise - then at some point wracu were not magic and were tekne.

So then the question becomes what magic they do have. Arguably there is no magic that would be as beneficial as being immune to magic, given that only giants and wizards can hope to kill or fight one.
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If what wutteat says is true - and there is a lot of reason to think otherwise - then at some point wracu were not magic and were tekne.

So then the question becomes what magic they do have. Arguably there is no magic that would be as beneficial as being immune to magic, given that only giants and wizards can hope to kill or fight one.


Well, that's not really true. Tanhafut, the Red was killed by Nau-Cayûti at the Battle of Ossirish, and while Nau is said to be strong, he's never regarded as a giant or anything.

Then again, we don't know how he did it...
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If what wutteat says is true - and there is a lot of reason to think otherwise - then at some point wracu were not magic and were tekne.

 

This has been my assumption.

 

As for your question: yes, a dragon wizard might be a bit overpowered. Almost unfairly so, in fact. So it stands to reason that in this world they are simply nearly invulnerable flying battletanks.

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IT'S

 

NOT

 

A

 

TUMOUR!

 

We know that magic can be tied to objects so there is no reason to think this would not apply equally to a mobile object.

Because of the semantic difference

 

You don't think of yourself as soil/dust at location X, do you? As much, an object at location X is not the same as the soil/dust/ground at location X.

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IT'S
 
NOT
 
A
 
TUMOUR!
 
Because of the semantic difference
 
You don't think of yourself as soil/dust at location X, do you? As much, an object at location X is not the same as the soil/dust/ground at location X.

I don't follow this but it must be wrong. (Like Kim's counter argument to the Ontological Argument.) We see magic tied to mobile objects in the book. Wathi dolls.
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Or her nimil armor, or the other sword she has (Squirrel), or the great gate of Sauglish...things can be enchanted. 

 

It would be an interesting twist if the only way something could be enchanted is if souls were bound to it in some way. Akka's talking about soul trapping being one of the oldest magics hints at this. It's possible that the armor and weapons that Mimara and Akka have are fueled by soul trapping as well. 

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Where's the 'seat of the soul' in Earwa?  Are souls magic?  If the seat of the soul was the stomach, could you swallow a Chorae and erase your soul?

I don't think so. Your soul is in the right "frame" so the chorae wouldn't affect it. But the chorae would destroy the magic binding a soul to an object.
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I don't follow this but it must be wrong. (Like Kim's counter argument to the Ontological Argument.) We see magic tied to mobile objects in the book. Wathi dolls.

But think, you say it yourself - it HAS to be a doll!

 

If it were, say, a chunk of stone, it wouldn't work - it lacks the semantic ties.

 

Though perhaps a statue made of stone might work.

 

The less it strains the semantic connections, the more likely it'll work out.

 

It's like if I said harry potter was a robot all along, it'd break the semantic connections. Does not compute!

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Or her nimil armor, or the other sword she has (Squirrel), or the great gate of Sauglish...things can be enchanted. 
 
It would be an interesting twist if the only way something could be enchanted is if souls were bound to it in some way. Akka's talking about soul trapping being one of the oldest magics hints at this. It's possible that the armor and weapons that Mimara and Akka have are fueled by soul trapping as well. 

So if say, mimara misunderstood the topos as cilaujus not as the suffering of slaves accreted in happenstance over millenia, but was instead a deliberate collection project of souls tied to the stone in particular formation to enchant the mansion for the purpose of creating massive Gates....






AND THERE WAS REVELATION!!!!!!!!!!


GUYS GUYS LISTEN! THE NONMAN MANSIONS, THEY ARE ALL ARKS LIKE GOLGOTTERANTH, THE WALLS OF THE MANSIONS OF CIL AUJIS WERE ONCE ALIVE, ONCE THAT ENDLESS STAIR WAS ONCE A HORN AKIN TO THE INCHOROI SPACECRAFT HORNS. THE TORMENT IS DELIBERATE TO CREATE GATES. VIRI WENT TO FAR THEIR GATE BROUGHT THE INCHOROI NOT OBLIVION.


***Wanders away muttering in pursuit of more alcohols....***
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GUYS GUYS LISTEN! THE NONMAN MANSIONS, THEY ARE ALL ARKS LIKE GOLGOTTERANTH, THE WALLS OF THE MANSIONS OF CIL AUJIS WERE ONCE ALIVE, ONCE THAT ENDLESS STAIR WAS ONCE A HORN AKIN TO THE INCHOROI SPACECRAFT HORNS. THE TORMENT IS DELIBERATE TO CREATE GATES. VIRI WENT TO FAR THEIR GATE BROUGHT THE INCHOROI NOT OBLIVION.


***Wanders away muttering in pursuit of more alcohols....***

That actually is a great observation. So Viri was the topos that reached out into the outside...literally. Well, I don't think its true, as the text supports the Inchoroi landing on planet after planet trying to find salvation. Still, pretty slick though. Damn, that make plenty of sense, though.

ETA: Locke, come on. You can't give us a middle of the night, drunken revelation, and not come back and elaborate. I'm waiting.
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Believe it or not I had a MASSIVE elaborating post completed on my phone that took a half hour to do and my stupid galaxy decides to do one of its random power cycles and killed the whole thing. I even bought TJE on Kindle and pasted in a half dozen quotes.

unrelatedly, I watched a brief history of time after the post fail and can now make a post that better explains the section I quoted where mimara passes through the chorae singularity. The universe is full of happy coincidence.
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clearly, the preface quote of TJE is referring to mansions and golgotterath, respectively.
 

But who are you, man, to answer God thus? Will what is made say to him who made it— Why have you made me this way? Does the potter not have power over his clay, to make, from the same mass, one vessel for honour, and another for dishonour? ROMANS 9: 20– 21

The Gates are no longer guarded. Mimara is also on her knees, also shrieking, yet her fingers somehow find her purse, begin fumbling, pinching the Chorae that nearly killed the Wizard. She cringes beneath the looming aspect, a child beneath a collapsing city wall. She hugs her limbs against the piercing pleas of little mouths, the moaning masses of the damned … And somehow lifts her Tear of God. She knows not what she does . She knows only what she glimpsed in the slave chamber, that single slow heartbeat of light and revelation. She knows what she saw with the Judging Eye. The Chorae burns as a sun in her fingers, making red wine of her hand and forearm, revealing the shadow of her bones, and yet drawing the eye instead of rebuking it, a light that does not blind. “I guard them!” she weeps, standing frail beneath the white-bleached Seal. “I hold the Gates!”



***
They lie in a chamber of some kind, the dimensions of which escape the feeble light, gathered in a corner where the cycling gusts are broken by the confluence of walls. The air is too fleet and too cold to possess smell. She first notices the graffiti while watching Soma. Strings of white-scratched characters score the wall all about him, the lines so dense where the hardened flow meets the wall as to almost seem like decoration, but thinning out into lone scribbles about his shoulders and neck— according, she realizes, to the original floor and the limited reach of its ancient authors.

The wind flutes in the dark, eerie and disharmonious.

She ponders the scratches with the clarity of concentration that comes only with absolute exhaustion. Her soul, which so often seemed to be petalled like a flower, a thing of frail confusion, has become as simple as a stone, a lamp that can shine upon one thing and one thing only. The signs themselves mean nothing to her, nor, she imagines, to anyone living. But the character of their scratching almost shouts too loud. These are human signs, she realizes, scraped in the throes of human anguish. Names. Curses. Pleas.

And somehow she just knows: This was once a place of great suffering.


“What is this place?” Xonghis asks.

Cleric’s black eyes hold Mimara for an appraising instant. “A kind of barracks … I think. For ancient captives.”

“A slave pit,” Mimara croaks , so softly that several of the others turn to her frowning. But she knows the Nonman has heard.

A serpentine blink. His grin reveals the arc of his fused teeth— the same as the Sranc, only not fanged and serrated. He speaks, and for a heartbeat, his face becomes a mask before the sun …

A Surillic Point sparks to life in the air above him; white light blows out and across the darkness.

The chamber is massive. Terraces climb about their lonely corner. How high or how far none can tell , since the height and breadth quickly outrun the light. But they can clearly see the chap-bronze cages that pack each of the terrace walls— cruel confinements no larger than a single man—enough for hundreds, even thousands, standing hollow save for shadows, their wretched prisoners having rotted free long, long ago.

Even though Mimara can imagine how the room once looked, the tiers of piteous faces and clutching hands, it is the graffiti, scratched out along the lowermost wall as far as the light can reach, that most afflicts her heart. The Emwama, and their proof of misery, she realizes. She can almost see their shades, massed in hopeless clots, looks averted from the horrors hanging above, ears aching …

A shudder passes through her, so deep her eyes and limbs seem to rattle in their sockets.

And she thinks, Cil-Aujas …

***

For a vertiginous moment, Mimara has the impression of staring up from the bottom of an inconceivable well, as though she were no more than a mite, waiting for gods to draw water. It seems impossible that this shaft runs the entire height of the mountain, that a single work can link the heavens to the hell at their feet.



***

A new light.

It flickers like a star for long hanging heartbeat, then flares with eye-averting brilliance.

A new chamber.

The tiered walls rise into shadow about them, the bronze-barred cages lined like pupae across them— as before. But each encases a mad thrashing, arms reaching, hands clutching, mouths shrieking, a thousand moments of anguish, a thousand souls, condensed into a mad, smoking blur. Eyes stacked upon eyes, drawn across eyes. The arcs of teeth, a shining multitude. Swatches of welted skin. The Emwama scream, thousands upon thousands of them, forever buried, forever sealed from their native sun.

An age of torment compressed into a single wail …

***

“No. That’s not it. It’s this place . This very room! It’s what they did—the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas … It’s what they did to their human slaves!”

Stay with me, note Cleric does not call it a slave pit, he doesn't contradict but he illustrates her incorrect assumption. No one builds a prison like foucolt, it has no function this panopticon, unless its very shape is like the gate to the library of sauglish only orders of magnitude larger and mire complex.

Heaven to Hell, consider a simple drawing of a black hole, what happens if you fall through it. Compressed into a singularity. at the medial screw, you have chambers of compressed suffering, condensed to a single point.

In a black hole there are no laws of physics and science, a place of maximal objectivity...

PLACE. Chorae, Khora.

combine plato, derrida and hawking.

A chorae is a singularity.

But, a nonman mansion, or golgotteranth is also something of a constructed singularity... machine... sort of a large hadron collidor for singularities, a clumsy way to connect heaven and hell, perhaps to study it...

but this raises the question as well, is a soul a singularity, a connection between heaven and hell? if so, would a density of souls collapsing on themselves (like a dying star collapsing on itself) create enough mass to construct a gate for hordes, or even worlds to pass through?

(important aside, wtf does "breaking of the gates" really mean? it seems hopelessly naive to assume these are physical gates rather than gates like the ones Mimara holds...)
 

, she sits some distance from him, and at last draws the Chorae from the sweaty pocket it has pressed into her breast. Though she has grown accustomed to its inverted presence, there is a surreality to the act of taking it into her hand, a sense that it is not the Trinket that moves so much as it is the whole of creation about it. She has no clue why it should compel her. Everything about it shrieks anathema. It is the bane of her heart’s sole desire, the thing she must fear above all once she begins uttering sorcery. What almost killed Achamian.

The light of the Surillic Point does not touch it, so that even its worldly aspect seems an insult to her eyes. It is a ball of shadow in her palm, its iron curve, its skein of ancient writing, illuminated only by the low crimson glow that leaks through the entrance. It seems to brood and to seethe . The abyssal dimensions of its Mark are a greater insult still. She can scarce focus when she looks with the eyes of the Few. It is as if it rolls from her sight and thought each time she centres her attention upon it.

And yet she stares and stares, like a boy gazing at some remarkable bug. Low voices flutter through the portals of the wind. She can hear some of the scalpers hammering at the dragon’s teeth— even in disaster, their mercenary instincts have not abandoned them. The Wizard lies prone in her periphery.

Shivers scuttle like spiders from her palm to her heart and throat, pimpling her entire skin. She glares at it, concentrates her breath and being upon its weightless horror, as if using it to mortify her soul the way shakers use whips and nails to mortify their flesh. She floats in the prickle of her own sweat.

The suffering begins. The pain …

It’s like thumbing a deep bruise at first, and she almost revels its odd, almost honey sweetness. But the sensation unravels, opens into an ache that swells about wincing serrations, as if teeth were chewing their own mouth through sealed muscle and skin. The violence spreads. The clubs begin falling, and her body rebels down to its rooted bowel, gagging at memories of salt. Emptiness itself … Lying cupped in her palm, a sheering void, throwing hooks about her, a million lacerating stings.

She grunts spit between clenched teeth, grins like a dying ape. Anguish wracks her, as deep as deep, but the smallest nub of her remains, an untouched sip, still conscious of the Wizard lying in her periphery , and it sees that he is the same yet transfigured, an old ailing man, and a corpse boiled in the fires of damnation …

The Judging Eye has opened.

She feels it leaning through her worldly eyes, pressing forward, throwing off the agony like rotted clothes, snuffing fact from sight, drawing out the sanctity and the sin. With terrible fixation it stares into the oblivion spilling from her palm …

And somehow, impossibly, passes through.

She blinks on the far side of contradiction, her face and shoulders pulled back in a warm wind, a breath, a premonition of summer rain. And she sees it, a point of luminous white, a certainty, shining out from the pit that blackens her grasp. A voice rises, a voice without word or tone, drowsy with compassion, and the light grows and grows, shrinking the abyss to a rind, to the false foil that it is, burning to dust, and the glory, the magnificence, shines forth, radiant, blinding …

And she holds all …

In her hand she holds it!

***

“I hold the Gates!”

***

She cranes around looking for Lord Kosoter. She can sense his Chorae the way she can sense her own, but it also feels different, like an outward shining instead of a pinprick of inhaling black. She sees him dozing against the wall with several others, his square beard crushed against the blood-painted splint of his hauberk . But since his Chorae is pocketed, she has no way of knowing whether it also shines in her natural sight.

Fear flushes through her, seems to pull the ancient slave chamber into a slow roll about the axis of her heart.

Something is happening to me …

This is when she notices the stranger.

***
“Where are the doors?” Galian blurted. He looked around in the quarrelsome manner that some use to conceal their fright. “What does it mean? Gates without doors?”
But questions always came too late. Events had to be pushed passed the point of denial; only then could the pain of asking begin.

“This is just a fucking place,” Sarl growled. “Just another fucking place …”
place=khora
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