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4th Link of the Maester's Path


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It’s now live, and boy, it was a tough one. There’s really two parts to this puzzle, as you try and put pages from a journal observing the seasons back into some sort of order. Here’s some hints:

  • It really does look like you can sort of decipher the texts—weird characters and all—if you know the names of the various houses represented on the pages, which the Heraldry section of the Citadel could reveal ... but we’ll just note them because, in fact, you do not in fact need to decipher the text: Baratheon, Bracken, Frey, Florent, Greyjoy, Lannister, Mormont, Redwyne, Stark, Targaryen, Tully, and Tyrell.
  • The easy part of the puzzle is figuring out which page should be uppermost between the front and back pairs. Look at the moonphases, and set them out so that the earliest part of the cycle is towards you.
  • The hard part is deciphering the order of the various pages. The key to them? Look down at the bottom. Those are numerals, and given the fact that each pair shares the same numeral, we can guess they are not page numbers. Instead, they are probably years…
  • And if they’re years, we know that the first digit—which is the same between all of them—must be either 1 or 2, making these pages covers the 100th-odd or 200-odd year since Aegon’s Landing (remember, it’s not quite the year 300 AL).
  • Could the digits under the weather symbols be helpful? Maybe, if you can guess the season based on the weather, you can make a stab at what sort of temperatures (hot or cold), and narrow down the possibilities.
  • There’s just seven digits in total used for the years, so you might be able to eliminate some from contention on that basis…

Not an easy puzzle, by any means, but a satisfying one to figure out!

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That Greyjoy heraldry is a crime against art, design, the Ironborn, GRRM, motherhood, apple pie, the Great Proletarian Revolution AND sliced bread. Its creator should not only be flogged, but condemned to a perpetuity of painting only the less complicated bits on Velvet Elvises to be sold at flea markets. He/she is not only unfit to stand among the Ironborn, but unfit for being a salt spouse or even a thrall. Shark bait, pure and simple. Though one suspects even sharks would want no association.

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That Greyjoy heraldry is a crime against art, design, the Ironborn, GRRM, motherhood, apple pie, the Great Proletarian Revolution AND sliced bread. Its creator should not only be flogged, but condemned to a perpetuity of painting only the less complicated bits on Velvet Elvises to be sold at flea markets. He/she is not only unfit to stand among the Ironborn, but unfit for being a salt spouse or even a thrall. Shark bait, pure and simple. Though one suspects even sharks would want no association.

To be fair, the artist may have been trying to depict the artwork as it would actually have been done by the maester whose notes these are supposed to be. As we all know, there is no link in any maester's chain for fine art, so the heraldry depicted in the 4th puzzle may be a good depiction of bad art.

One might as easily criticize the clouds depicted as being "not accurate representation of clouds".

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To be fair, the artist may have been trying to depict the artwork as it would actually have been done by the maester whose notes these are supposed to be. As we all know, there is no link in any maester's chain for fine art, so the heraldry depicted in the 4th puzzle may be a good depiction of bad art.

One might as easily criticize the clouds depicted as being "not accurate representation of clouds".

In my notes for the puzzle, it is listed as "House Twisted Intestines of the Wrong Color".

ETA - Malt: We expect you to transcribe all of the notes (in spoiler boxes of course). :)

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So the suggestion is to ignore the 1st number. Try to figure out an order based on the second glyph and then if there is more than one with the same second glyph - try to order with the 34d glyph?

ETA: Do we know whether they consider Spring the beginning and winter the end?

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The seasons are not necessarily in sequence, because it represents a wide range of years.

Duh. Right.

I was thinking that the numbering under the weather symbols might help figure out the numbering system.

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In my notes for the puzzle, it is listed as "House Twisted Intestines of the Wrong Color".

ETA - Malt: We expect you to transcribe all of the notes (in spoiler boxes of course). :)

They've already been transcribed over on Winter is Coming - go read the comments section there.

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For those who are well and truly stuck, there's a solution in the WiC comments here. Remember to put the pages in backwards - i.e. the highest numbered one goes on the bottom. Also make sure they're the right way round.

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The thing that is bothering me the most is trying to determine which side of the page should face up and which should face down. It's the only thing that I can see no clues that help. I thought maybe the side with the rougher edge would be torn from the book, but that doesn't work for all pages.

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Lord Godric - it's funny, because that's the part I found easiest. It's to do with the lunar cycles; assuming the moon works the same way as ours, you can "read" the cycle across the first (face up) page and straight into the second (face down). Then you have to get each sheet into order.

Until I saw Ran's hint above, I too thought it was all for one year, with page numbers at the bottom, so I was trying to work out how to get them all in order. Much easier once I realised they were different years, and that beneath the sun/cloud/snow/wind/rain box was a temperature prediction, not a day/date.

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