Blue

1 ~ Blue

So what might be so special about this blue blood that I speculated upon in Primordial Soup then? Selitos is our main blue blooded example but his power was held to be in his ‘magical’ ability to look into the hearts of men and read them like heavy lettered books, and he was not alone…

‘In those days there were many who could do such things but Selitos was the most powerful namer of anyone alive in that age.’

I suggest then that this blue blood of the namers is in some way fundamentally different to the red blood of those without any such naming powers. Perhaps it has something to do with a Namer changing their own name? Elodin tells us that the original namers walked the streets like tiny goods and were obviosly far superior to their servants, the common folk and other serving men like foot soldiers. But could anybody become a namer or is this skill inherent only to certain bloodlines? and more importantly, can this power that blue bloods may possess be passed on biologically unto their blue blooded offspring (if any there be) in order to continue that particular namers dynasty of power? That any individuals blood could suddenly change colour upon gaining mastery of naming powers seems an unlikely twist, (but not impossible!) and so it would seem to be the safest approach to go along the more easily explained route and simply say that Selitos and his peers were not just a bunch of learned mortal namers who had learnt to work ‘magic’ but instead they were all members of a non-human species who were currently spending their spare time living it up in the lands of mortal, much like Bast is currently doing in Newarre and Felurian was once wont to do on occasion in Murella.

Perhaps they were what we call Fae using their innate glamourie skills to walk freely among the race of man cleverly disguised as fellow humans. If this were so then it appears that whilst they were here, some of them were actively using their fawn power to rule like ‘tiny gods’ over a land which was not their own and so were actively exploiting their fairy power to secretly rule over the lives of the lesser mortals who they treated like pieces to be won or lost in the playing of their games. What little we know of these rulers of Ergen tells us that they were either making alliances with or waging war upon each other and in doing so were employing these local mortal men (like Lanre) in their armies to battle against their enemies own monstrous regiments.

Who then would that enemy be? That would clearly be some other factions from that other realm, the darker sort mentioned by Felurian who ‘would love to use you for their sport’, beings like Encanis who declared upon the wheel that ‘your people are like cattle my kind feed upon… etc etc’. This dual fae line of reasoning will give us a situation where we actually have two different faen groups (namers and shapers if that helps any) who, by our own mortal standards, must both of them be considered as alien invaders who were in fact only fighting their faen wars for faen reasons upon a mortal battlefield of mortal land under the single mortal moon of which they were both desirous.

History might perhaps record them by using a good fae/bad fae analogy but ultimately, if they were all fae, then from a neutral viewpoint I would suggest that the local humans whose land this once was would have been far better off without the attentions of them both. 

Blue

But leaving all those mad faen thoughts to run off and play in the woods for a bit, let’s get back to my thoughts on the Ergen blue blood. How do we even know that it even actually exists in the first place and is not just something that I have made up to help explain a point? Well Felurian, whose authority we can trust absolutely concerning such things tells us quite catagotically that

‘There were never any human Amyr.’

Now Selitos One-Eye was the founder of the Amyr. Selitos was also the Lord of Myr Tariniel. Selitos was therefore a man of Ergen… an Ergenite? QED. Selitos one-eye would not be classed as a human when he formed his Amyr. This was something Felurian said most assuredly, laughing at the very thought of there being such a thing as a mortal Amyr, and she should know since she was probably there herself on that day when the Amyr first formed ranks.

On the other hand, Lanre most definitely was human. Arliden tells us so.

‘A story of a man. Proud Lanre.’

When mining for tinfoil we have to follow the rule that everything that we are given to work with in Pat’s great work was truthfully spoken by the character involved, although perhaps only as far as the speaker in question believes themselves to be telling the truth. (Man mothers is one good example to ponder here.) This means that we must accept both these Pat quotes to be true, and if you do that then it becomes clear that these two famous names from Skarpi’s first 'history of Ergen' story were actually two people from two completely different species. One of them human and other one assuredly not! Now we aren’t simply talking about them both hailing from two of the many different peoples of Temerant here, one of them with say black skin and the other with perhaps red hair, oh no, this goes an awful lot deeper than that! Whilst this most likely means that Selitos was in all actuality himself one of the fae, that is only the most likely answer to run with since using words like 'Aleu' and ‘Titan’ today will only confuse matters further.

Many other thoughts are available to our tinfoil minds and so part humans who are also non humans might be the answer. Trapis, for instance mentions of Perial’s fellow villagers that

‘They were afraid that she may have lain down with a demon, and that her child was a demon’s child. Such things were not unheard of in these dark times, and the people were afraid.’

This statement will allow for the cross breeding of man and monster as being an actual thing and that situation might well make any such demon spawn count as being decidedly non-human, things to be regarded not as true men but more like ‘bad things in the shape of men'. Other non-human words we might call upon to ponder here are dennerlings and shamblemen, or maybe gremen and daruna, and from HOHCTB we have reports of men bent into the shape of wolves with tongues of fire which might be descriptive of early shaped humans. Even if they were not now considered as human then Selitos and co. may very well at some point in time have been part of the original founding fatherhood of mankind as we know it, but at some point had themselves become bent into something more and/or less than they once were, more like a creation of parts rather than a true man as we might consider such things to be. A shaped for purpose hybrid perhaps of both manblood and faeblood might work which would create a situation where any such half fae might now be labelled as a third species not able to be banished back to their own land like the fully fledged 100% demonic invaders could by any means known to Tehlu, all because of their unique dual nationality of having a demon spirit wearing the fleshy body of a man. This might even lead us to thoughts that Lord Selitos could be considered as a skin dancer using Pat’s terminology but for now, I’m going to coin my own label and go with simply declaring him to be a mutant.

Man and Superman 

Standing against whatever Lord Mutant was biologically we have Lanre, who was born and named as a true man should be, a red blooded man who had armies of other loyal men under his command. By marriage, he was now one of the lords of Ergen who had often spoken with his Lord Selitos in the past as two equals might. But Myr Tariniel always outranked all of the other cities in the grand order of Ergen and so Lord Lanre would still be regarded ed as this mutant Lord Selitos’ inferior as far as having any real power was concerned.

All of this rambling will I hope, help lead us to a very interesting scenario unfolding before us which is starting to look a lot like a situation where this master race of mutants were ruling over the subordinate race of mankind, a species who hadn’t even realised what was really going on yet.

‘Was I counted a good man, Selitos?’

‘You were counted among the best of us, we considered you beyond reproach.’

These lines seem to compound the dual species situation we are investigating but just who is this ‘us and we’ that Selitos speaks of here? The other lords of Ergen perhaps, his fellow rulers of the other seven cities? Or just the other powerful folk like Selitos who posessed naming powers of their own, his fellow members of the Ergen immortal arcanum perhaps? It sounds like we are actually looking for the ‘many who could do such things’ here of whom Skarpi has earlier spoken.

Whilst we will never know exactly how many is that many, we do know something about those specific three persons whom Selitos personally names as being his equals in power. Aleph, Iax, and Lyra, a statement which must surely mark all three of these as belonging to the same name knowing mutant species as himself marking them all to be further examples of non-humans, too. Below these four top mutants we would then perhaps find some of the other leaders of the other cities, people of high office from across all of the eight ruling races of Ergen, with perhaps only a few of them being as human as they might first appear to be.

One such ruler of Ergen was Lanre himself, husband to Lady Lyra of Belen* and therefore Lord Lanre by default in the public eye although his own power came not from any naming skills but from the strength of his arm and in his command of loyal men. Yes, he was a strong and brave man, skilled with a sword in his hand. Yes he had been their great champion and saviour at the Blak of Drossen Tor and so yes, Lanre was certainlty someone who would now be considered beyond reproach and welcomed with open arms by these blue blooded ruling lords and ladies into their inner councils as a token of respect shown to the mortal peoples greatest warrior as the best hope for the salvation of all the other blue blooded Ergenites. But whilst he may have been counted a good man, he was always going to be 'just' a man whilst his ‘old friend’ Selitos, as we now know, wasn’t really any kind of hu-man at all… and it is growing ever more likely that neither was Lanre’s wife Lyra! Meaning that Lanre had married a mutant.

‘I am sorry to tell you this thing. You are a good man, and a pretty thing. But still, you are only a man. All you have to offer the world is your anger.’

Blue

Whichever way you choose to look at it Felurian’s Amyr quote clearly tells us that non-humans did indeed once exist as an actual factual presence in the mortal world, and indeed that many of them had held positions of great power to boot. Selitos is our opening link but we can also now see that all of those faithful Ruach who stepped forward to form his original Amyr will also be caught by Felurian’s catch-all statement. There were never any human Amyr and so obviously none of these faithful Ruach could ever have been considered human either. Our net can be expanded far further than that thought as Felurians assertion must also apply to ‘the rest of the ruach’, too since this collective group of ex-Ergenites provided the original cloth from which all of Selitos Amyr were once cut. Then there are special case Lord Tehlu and his flock of angels, none of whom could ever have qualified as humans in the first place by the same token.

 And so it now seems to me that it would be fair to say that there wasn’t a single drop of red blood in the room with Aleph on that day. This was a private meeting for just the blue bloods who were dealing with a purely mutant problem since it was the red blooded Lanre who had torn their playhouse down, and this gentile man was still out there somewhere displaying all of his righteous anger towards them and their kind.

This pleasing image should give us some idea of the scope of things as they stand. The blue bloods have had their power hold broken and are now just a tiny minority of blue blooded mutants hiding out among the red blooded population of mortal man. Without their great cities they are nothing. Outside of Aleph’s door the reds are running rife, doing whatever it is that any common or garden red blooded barbarian would normally find to do now that the creation war, which had blighted their human lives since time immemorial, was finally over.

Blue, Blue

So if Lanre’s fellow men were our red blooded humans and Skarpi’s Ruach are our blue blooded mutants then between them it is clear that they did somehow reach some kind of an accomodation with God and so did go forth together into the purple pages of history to shape the new future of Temerant the colour that we now see it to be. As an invasive non-human mutant species, these ruach might walk like a man and talk like a man, but they are catagorically Not representative of mankind as we know it. If the truth about what they really are ever came out, well they would most likely be treated appropriately by the local superstitious commoners, armed with flaming torches and pitchforks no doubt, who would happily solve the problem by holding burnings at the stake whenever any such a demon touched creature who had clearly been meddling with dark forces was ever suspected of living amongst them.

Now the Adem mutant strain already know about the presence in the world of these other mutants and in their own language they call what Selitos refers to as a Ruach, a Rhinta (the plural of which I predict will be Rhinata) who are loosely defined as being a group of men who are more than men but less than men… or rather shaped men.

‘Old things in the shape of men… and there are a handful worse than all the rest.’

But the real point of interest to be deduced here is that Shehyn still speaks about there being two distinct groups of Rhinta, the bad ones and the worse ones, and therefore she knows that both kinds of these collective mutants all still have their own place in the world today. This means that despite all of these mutants being regarded as old things, they are all of them also acknowledged to still be active many long years later. The implication of that will mean that all of these ruach/rhinta/blue blooded/ mutant/ Amyr/ chandrian people who are walking about today are the original models and must then have lived for some very long lifespans compared to their short lived human counterparts.

 I recently proposed that Skarpi himself is one of these immortal ruach people. I also called Skarpi a namer which will tick both boxes and make him our prime example of an actual factual blue blood who is still alive and well living in Temerant today. Is this then the magical benefit of having too much blue blood in your veins? Immortality? Well perhaps immortal is too far fetched a word even for this particular tinfoil tangle of Vaevin and Stangle, and so I will officially downgrade the immortal mutant theory here and now to Extreme Longevity instead since it must be noted that Sheyehn admits such things can be killed, just not killed easily. Our faen rhinta example of Felurian, whom Kvothe admits he could have ripped apart like a butterfly, is further proof that an immortal fae could indeed be killed but also gives the Extreme Longevity clause it’s full backing at the same time so perhaps we can just agree that none of these classic blue blooded muants will ever likely die naturally of old age.

‘Death. All lives end in death, excepting one. Such is the way of things.’

As for Tehlu’s one and only exception to this rule, well that finger points at the one man in the world who can lay claim to being truly immortal. This line that was spoken by Tehlu, the son of God, who knows the truth about such things and it can only ever be applied to the man called Lanre to whom we all know death is always now an open door. But despite all of his new found powers and his guaranteed immortality, he was born a man and so will remain one in my eyes no matter what his name might have been changed to today. And he will remain a man ‘until the world ends and the Aleu fall nameless from the sky’.

.

 

2 ~ Aleu

"Until the Aleu fall nameless from the sky"

So what in Temerant is an Aleu? 

All we can really divine from that sentence is that Aleu is a plural which is deserving of capitalization, that they currently reside somewhere above us where they were fully expected to remain until the end of days. They also hold a noteworthy association with Names.

"In the beginning... The world was spun out of the nameless void by Aleph, who gave everything a name..."

 My best character match up to the Aleu description from these few clues we are given in the books is that Lord Aleph is the favourite to qualify as one of the Aleu since He is a non corporeal being who knows the names of all things which effectively makes him a God and thus should be fully expected to always remain an eternal presence overseeing his domain beneath. 

Falling nameless from the sky sounds an awful lot like a metaphor for death, but my general overview of Gods is that they cannot actually die, it's simply not possible. Death is a purely mortal fate that is denied to them. Translating the line as "until God falls nameless... ' is then talking then about the downfall of Aleph and of Him one day somehow forgetting the names of all things, perhaps including his own, meaning that God Himself must become officially recognised as being... nameless. Unfortunately for that path, imho neither can Gods ever forget anything, It's simply not part of the design for omnipotent beings to do this. Once learnt a Name cannot be forgotten. Neither can a god go mad, or go to sleep for that matter because the Aleu are in fact superior beings from a seperate plane of reality that puts them way beyond the meagre limitations of the four doors of the mortal mind.

 

If God is omnipotent, then How can there be more than one God? Well that's actually quite easy to explain.

The first rule of any universe is that For every action there is a equal and opposite reaction. And that law dictates that if God must always have a twin, who is usually called the Devil. Why? Because God is Light and you cannot create light without also creating shadow at the same time, and darkness is the colour that Hiis godly opposite Aleu must always wear. Between them these two gods will control everything in between their two extremes (except for the moon of course , she is a third party Aleu anomaly with whom I shall deal with properly on another day, ) . This Anti-Aleph twin of God's counterpart needs a calling name and in these books he is called Iax and in his own way he also knows the names of all things. They are the two halves of the same universal concept,  like the two ends or the same piece of string. You can perhaps think of them variously as light and dark, One and zero. On and off, Alpha and Omega ...It's all the same thing really. Two Aleu. Perfectly balanced. As any good universal system should be. Absolute opposites in all the ways that matter. If one of them knows the light names of all things, then the other one must know their dark names for perfect balance.

Aleph is of course the self same white Aleu who appeared in Perial's dream as a being 'made entirely of fire or sunshine.' we therefore know that it was really him because any Agent of darkness would have appeared suitably clad in the colours of the opposition.

How were the Aleu born? Well...

In The Beginning there was the nameless void and at that point this void was all that there was. 

Now if such a thing can be done, then I would imagine this void to have looked a bit like a vast field of non dimensional static. Lots and lots and lots of little bits of stuff, all everywhere and all at once, so many bits that numbers are pretty much irrelevant, a maelstrom snowstorm of naming possibilities comprised  of half black stuff and half white stuff all jumbled up together in a sea of grey.

That's when Aleph made his grand entrance. In becoming aware of his surroundings he made a choice and decided to separate all the white bits of stuff out of the void and put them all together in one big pile.

As an inevitable consequence of his actions, this meant that all of the bits of black stuff were also separated out at the same time. These were the undesirable parts to Alephs ideal and were put to one side thus the concept of choice was created within the nameless void and now there were two piles of all things. A black pile and a white pile of dividing all the naming possibilities into two. By dividing the whole void to his own personal ideal, Aleph had created a duality. In the instant that He became Lord of one side, another Aleu must have risen into existence on the other side to retain a  balance to the universe. AleuAleph is now the Lord of Light and he gets to play with all the white light named things that he has collected together into his realm. His opponent is then, the Lord of Shadows and he gets to play with all the black light named things on his side of the divide.

The Aleu are the beings that move the pieces about on their gameboard. One such game piece is called Selitos and he is the most important White piece on the table. His master is his Lord Aleph and his name for this dark Aleu of Ergen opposition is Iax. These two A & I Aleu are then a lot like two sides of the same coin where if White is heads thrn Black is tails. Two halves of the same thing, Each counted as Lord and Master over their own side of the coin and never the twain shall meet. Well, that was the theory, anyway.

If we try and describe these two realms in two mortal dimensions the simplest image to conjour would be one of one single flat plane of existence but one that is double sided. The A side is where all the light names reside and the B side is where to find their opposite dark names. If we take Pats thinking of everything having a Three part name on this A side of the board then if follows that this same number should reciprocally be present over on the dark side which suggests to me that the combined long names of all things on both sides might then actually be constructed of six named parts in total.

Aleph and Iax are my choices of name for the Aleu. Twin gods, both masters of their opposite realms. And if prophecy has any bearing then both of them are now doomed to fall Nameless from their respective skies in the not so distant future...

In Hespe's story, these two Aleu opposites do actually get to meet when the White Lord goes exploring on the Dark Lord's side of their game board where, because choice and chance have now been created, they decided to play a game.

3 ~ Jax

 We know quite a bit about Aleph but bugger all about Iax except that He is also right up there in the naming things department.

Now, in our books the name Iax is very close in appearance to that of another character, Jax, and it sounds entirely possible that they are indeed one and the same person, just like Kote is Kvothe. Name changing is becoming a common theme here. Bast tells us that it was Iax who stole the moon whilst Hespe claims that was Jax instead, so which one was it? simply having similar looking names is not enough for a true tin foil theory to stand up on its own. To answer the whole question of who is who is going to take us deeper into the tinfoil mines and we shall have to start poking about in the affairs of gods, and mere mortal minds like ours are not really meant to understand such things. Still, we can but try...

When written together we have a pair of names which could be broken into two parts each. I+AX and J+AX. The difference here is admittedly very small, the smallest part there is really, in text the two are just a brushstroke apart, just a tittle really. You could argue that a j is just an i with a tail! On planet Earth it is [often common practice] to change the spellings of some words between these two different letters in different languages. This is best summed up by referencing the ancient Greeks who didn’t have a letter for J in their alphabet and so the letter I was used instead. The letter J is a modern improvement in Terran linguistics, introduced some 500 years ago, and this new letter idea could conceivably apply to the languages of Temerant too. Supposing it did and life in this parallel universe were to evolve in a similar pattern and a similar linguistic alteration has occurred. Timewise this would historically put it somewhere around the same time that Aturan was being adopted as the first language of the changing land and that might well be when their letter J was introduced to Vintas.  However, if we are going down the broken road of allowing any old crossovers from our world into Pat’s we should point out that Greek is not a language of Temerant and therefore not a very reliable link. The most common Temerant usage of the letter ‘J’ occurs in everyday life within our aforementioned word Jot, something that didn't exist until long after Tehlu Day. The word Jot is also a used in our world to mean the smallest part of something, it is directly taken from the name of the smallest of the ancient Greek letters ‘I’ or to give it’s full name, ‘Iota’, and these two words, jot and iota, mean exactly the same thing. It is also defined in my Terran dictionary as a tittle, a small punctuation mark for minor alterations, as in ‘dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s’ and so we see the link in a better light as it is the difference encountered when writing both letters in the upper case, one of them takes one brushstroke, the other takes two. It still means the same thing with both spellings but is often interchangable depending on the age of a specific words usage. This gives us at least one bent leg to stand on in declaring them as being one and the same thing. A ‘J’ is just an ‘I’ wearing a new hat.

But our two names could equally be broken into JA+X and IA+X, and looking at them like this makes things a bit more interesting. As we worked out elsewhere, Ademic is an original Ergen language used at Drossen Tor and is therefore ideal for our purpose. From that ancient time of Temerant, ‘Ia’ is a simple word that means ‘Yes’ or perhaps ‘OK’ as we hear Tempi indicate it's affirmative aspect for us during the attack on the bandits camp. Conversely, an ‘X’ is the universally recognised symbol for ‘No’ or ‘not OK’ and so approaching the problem from this angle implies to me that Iax actually translates into ‘Yes/No’, a paradox that pretty much sums up the word chance, or rather the outcomes available if you are fond of a wager and are betting on something where the odds are ’50-50′ such as the question ‘I’m betting that I have something in my tinkers pack that will make you happy. What do you say to that?’ and this is the nub of the whole story. The only definitive options are either ‘yes, I bet you have ‘ or ‘no, I bet you haven’t’ and thereby hangs the whole wager on which they shook hands and thus created a possibility.

‘Ja’ also means ‘yes’ in our world, if you happen to be German, as we can discover in the online wiktionary’s top two examples ‘Een Ja kan je Krijgen, Een nee heb je al ~ A yes you can get, a no you have already.’ and ‘Het begon met een Ja ~ It began with a yes.’ which, in my opinion, are both rather good quotes to be shared with the world. If we are deciding to allow Earthly interference at a Greek level, then this reinforces our argument from a German angle, too. 

If we are opening up our packs of earthly knowledge we ought to acknowledge Latin as well and also consider numbers since the universe is run by numbers, not words. X is the Roman numeral for Ten and if we are splitting things down to their smallest possible parts then we could argue that 10 is also made up of the numbers 1 and 0, the two numbers which make binary mathematics possible. Binary mathematics is base level stuff where, if a part is not regarded as being 1, then it is by default going to be Zero. When thinking of the possibilities for all the smallest parts of all matter that makes up the infinite universe at a tinfoil level, we need to apply such fundemental approaches to thinking. We can imagine it easiest if we think of everything at base level and therefore in a binary form. A binary number is like a switchboard where the options are either Off or On, In or Out, +ve or -ve, odd and even, dead or alive , black or white, or more pertinently, Yes or No. Both ends of this spectrum are perfectly valid answers to any question you may conceive and every part of every thing always comes down to this same paradox.  One or the Other but never Both. However you break it down, this is what life fundamentally translates to, it is a series of lights that can be either on or off, candles that might be lit or unlit and each small choice still retains the possibility of future change. But enough of all that, I’m getting lost myself trying to find words to describe numbers. The best argument I can offer is that even without these ridiculously small links, then we would struggle to find any reason for Pat ever mentioning mysterious Iax at all, or indeed for Hespe’s story being given so much ink space and that would seem completely out of sync with what Pat has achieved constantly throughout these lovely books so far. ‘There’s no good story that doesn’t touch the truth’ Arliden often said and so we must assume that this story has been put here deliberately to help link all things together. That is enough to convince me that in Pat's puzzle, Jax and Iax are most certainly meant to be one and the same person, without him making it all obvious, meaning that this story tells us of how unhappy Jax grew up to be the powerful Iax, a major player of the creation war.

π ~ Pax

So what game did they play, and what was the prize? 

 Well, that is very tricky since the story itself is purely allegorical. There is truth in it, yes, but not in the way it might first appear. Hespe remembers it as well as anyone could be expected to as this is the way that her mother always repeated it, a hundred times all told exactly the same. It has a rhythm to it, like a song, but sometimes words cannot properly describe deeds and things get lost in translation, especialy if you are trying to understand the motives of gods from a mortal point of view. It is an old story from long, long ago which even Kvothe of the ruh has never heard before. It stems from a time before Temerant and it touches upon things so ancient that we cannot truly relate to them. Nevertheless  something like this story did actually happen and this first interaction of the Aleu altered both of their realms at a godlike level. I believe that Aleph was represented in our tale as the tinker and that his packs contained the names of all his things in a form that can convey their meaning more easily for an audience to relate to. He knows the Light names of all things and the sum of all Light knowledge is this tinkers to bestow, and so whatever you desire, the answer will be found in one of his three packs, each of which requires progressively higher levels of understanding to control it.

/ Hespe's story is presented in two parts , one set in each realm. The turning point of the story is the introduction of the light spectacles with which dark Jax can, for the very first time, see the light of the uncountable stars and the shining face of the beguiling moon. /

Balls

The first pack contained small examples of the names of all things. if you start with the marbles, they are basically a selection of many different and individual names with no real connection, in appearance they are balls that can be made to touch each other by application of force. A rubber ball has more innate properties and will change direction of its own accord making it a better ball than a marble. With ball and cup, one ball is now on a piece of string which gives the holder of the cup some measure of control over the balls current location and of it’s desired destination. But Ball and cup is the worst game in the world and it did not make Jax happy. To catch a better ball, you need to build a better cup. Puppet’s are just a more complex version of ball and cup as you have more parts to consider and more strings to control. The random nature of dice may teach you about numbers and mathematics and permutations and possilities and then considering a folding knife could offer you safe ideas on ways to cut the controlling strings away altogether. 

But there are limits to what individual names can achieve and there was still a lot of work to do in putting all these names together. And that thought didn't make a Jax happy boy.

In the second pack, we find more complex ideas, things already been put together for you. The gear soldier would be the best version yet to show your level of control as it is a puppet that has been taught to follow simple instructions with no strings attatched. Ideas that you hadn't thought of yet might be found in a book of secrets perhaps, or the answer may be reached through mixing a few ideas together like you were mixing paints with different brushes. Fashioning a more receptive cup with more attractive properties can be achieved by employing rarities like loden stone, or rather sky iron into your schema. But Jax still didn't know what dream he wanted to achieve by shaping all this knowledge and so that thought didn't make Jax a happy boy either.

 Each ‘toy’ offered so far offers up increasing levels of control over our original ‘ball’. 

On donning the tinker's spectacles Jax saw the light and gained a better sight. Jax saw the ball he desires the most as the moon is also a ball and coincidentally is described as being round as a cup, but it would take something much more entertaining than toys and more complex than artifice to put her under your control. Naming is not enough. Shaping is not sufficient. That is a job for creation level powers, the sort of powers which are contained within the unopened third pack. Even with all the contents of the first two packs at his disposal the names of all things and the knowledge to put them together, Jax was unable to create his moon trap desire without the third pack which contained the Tinkers own divine creations.

Learning about how you can control balls is the path to knowledge that could help you reach your desire. It is imho like juggling, you start learning with one ball, then two, then three etc. You learn control over them one ball at a time until you reach the level where you are so good at juggling that dont even need to use your hands anymore to make all things dance to your desire, and that's the difference between science and magic

3 ~ Iax (reprise)

Jax didn't just win control of all Alephs pax of names, he also took his walking stick, his spectacles, and his hat which I'm thinking are analogous to items that allowed Iax to become the tinker and to assume the position that Aleph held back along the broken road into the realm of mortal, where he could chase down the moon to his broken hearts desire. Tinkering along the way. A black piece now wearing a white hat. Jax in disguise as Iax.  Without his identity Aleph needs must then have conversely assumed Jax position and been forced to remain in the broken house on the dark side of all things for universal balance. A white piece wrapped in the cloak of darkness. Meanwhile Jax became a J disguised as an I and thus a creature born of shadows entered into the realm of light for the very first time, introducing dark names into mortal, and it was all downhill from that day onwards.

When Jax beat the tinker he became the tinker. He won three things. Stick, packs and hat. These items enabled him to travel from one realm to the other. The original tinker would of course have to remain in Jax old broken house for balance. The universe itself demands balance.

Examining tinkA's reactions reveals that he was Not inconvenienced at all by the lack of his stick. Sticks are plentiful  The stick is a tree in the hand of a god. 

The packs were the second trade, but TinkA lost the bet fair and square so painful, but not critical. The loss of His Hat , however, seems to have been what tipped the balance. The hat maketh the man and Jax needed a hat if he was going to survive as the new tinker since all light is Anathema to all creatures of shadow. But this hat creates a patch of shade to shield and protect Jax from the harmful light

A hole in the light where the dark can get in.

Dark Light

4 ~ Maelstrom

The Mael

This theory of a parallel Realm of Darkness needs expanding upon and so the time has come to talk about the Mael. Now that’s not just a word that I have conjoured up since Bast also tells us of this place and we shall visit his quotes about it later on, but the Mael predates Bast as he freely admits, and so we needs must explore a bit earlier in time than his learned input. So we shall have to go even further back in our search to a time long before the Fae could even be considered as a Name, to a time before even the moon had arrived to light up this this dark realm. Now all good stories should start at the beginning, and in this book that means the beginning of all things.

This nameless void described in the next quote is eventually going to need naming properly if we are ever going to get anywhere and so I will put the first pin in the ground today and name this place as the Mael. The second pin will be found in the new world named by Aleph, and the fae realm will come along chronologically last of all to complete our universal triangle.

‘In the beginning the world was spun out of the nameless void by Aleph, who gave everything a name. Or, depending on the version of the tale, found the names all things already possessed.’

Creating a world is impressive stuff and we might assume that Aleph’s actions here must also have been responsible for the creation of the moon, too, since he would have had to name her as well before she could technically exist anywhere at all, but perhaps hers is an even older name than his? that’s another thought for much later down the path and for now let’s run with the quote’s second suggestion and assume that everything in the nameless void did already have a name, but that everything just needed to be told what that name actually was before it truly became itself.

This ancient naming action actually has a modern parallel with the moment when Kvothe gave Auri her new name since before he did that, she would surely have had to consider herself as being… nameless, and Names are Important. If Kvothe’s powers of naming things correctly are to be investigated further then we could suggest that instead of him actually naming these things all by himself he just stumbled upon the long name that already lay hidden inside of them. Auri was just awaiting his awakening song, and that he simply coaxed that hidden name to the surface, a lot like he did with one sock the horse. My preferred choice of theory is then that all longnames in every realm of existence were at one time, before time perhaps, all in the same place, reduced down to short names, their smallest possible pieces and then mixed up all together in the maelstrom that was the nameless void. But they still had dreams of evolution. This collection of everynames just needed some omnipotent being to come along and name them all correctly in order to create everythings longnames, spinning them into a ball of all the things they always desired to be from out of all the things that they decided they were not. Every act of creation is therefore going to be a putting the pieces back together problem, the repairing of something that didn’t yet know that it was even broken.

Describing what the nameless void might once have looked like might be comparable to the pages where we get to hear the various descriptions of how Taborlin’s cloak of no particular colour might appear since any answer that can be offered must be deemed valid until proven otherwise. Since you cannot prove non-existence this means that we can all happily continue to use our own imaginations to conjour up our own independent images as to what constitutes this primordial soup or ‘whole cloth’ from which all worlds were apparently once created. Just go with whatever suits you best. Most religious texts will have the creation of the universe being associated with some version of ‘God created light’ sort of speech, an action which will, of course, have also created the first shadows at the exact same time for good measure. There must always be balance in all things you know, that’s one of the big rules. And so we can assume that God saw the light, and that the light was good…but lesser reported but equally valid is the line where God also saw the shadow, and that was bad.

I personally like to imagine the original nameless void as looking like a vast field of static with lots and lots and lots of little specks of black and white all surging around together in a chaotic maestrom of Mael and Strom. A sea in a storm of white noise and of black noise, of course. Presented with this image , If I were then asked how some supreme being might even begin to consider a plan to give such chaos some sort of order, well, I would suggest we could start by taking all the little white bits and separating them away from all the little black bits until I had two piles of bits comprising all the bits that I wanted and all the bits which I didn’t. One pile could then go on to become the longnames used in Aleph’s newly spun world of Strom and the other pile would remain left behind for balance as Mael.

The implication here is that Aleph made choices and refering to his choices as black and white are only a choice of two contrasting small words which are you must admit a rather useless tool when it comes to getting your point across. You might prefer to think of the differences being those of left and right, up and down, in and out, light and shadow, positive and negative, named and un-named, shaped and unshaped, made and unmade, or maybe even just plain old good and evil, that one is always popular. Right and wrong might be a little closer to the truth sometimes but it doesn’t really matter because the real answer is probably going to incorporate all of these words and many, many more meaning that however you can imagine this image it will always be insufficient.

But knowing the answer is less important than knowing that there is an answer and the important thing to take from this is that through his action Aleph has clearly created a divison within the nameless void itself where none had existed before… meaning that for the first time ever, one dimensional void had now become two dimensional choice, a place of names and a place of anti-names. 

So if all the names in mortal came out of this process then what was left behind in the nameless void was just a shadow of mortal and was basically just a dumping ground for all the broken names, all the bits that were equally valid choices but which were unneeded or maybe just unlucky, unwanted, or unwelcome by Aleph in his new light-building project. It is entirely possible that the name of the dark side of the moon resides here somewhere... 

Of course Aleph might have left nothing at all behind after his work was done and instead tied up every single loose end in the nameless void and made perfect order out of utter chaos, which would actually half the void and not double it, and if that were actually true then His brave new world would never have known any wrong because it would always have been perfect, which it clearly was not now that one bad apple was introduced to the mix.

 Now that argument can run and run but I’m betting on the outcome being like the duality I describe simply because of three universal laws that declare that nothing can ever be destroyed, that there must always be balance and that nature abhors a vacuum. This would also mean that the power inherent in the names of this new place of Aleph’s should really be held to be equal to that of the power that remained in the Mael to perfectly counterbalance the universal nature of every name and effectively create a reciprocal realm to reflect Aleph’s creation, a broken realm to match his shiny new one. This is also the place where the twin Dark God called Iax must rule from, to provide a counterbalance to the Light God powers of Aleph.

However, that’s also another story and the time has come to wind this wordy introduction up and so in order to make further repetative typing of the long and boring phrase ‘nameless void’ obsolete, it shall here to be upgraded into two planes of reality namely white Mortal and black Mael.

Mortal is where to find Ergen/Temerant/4Corners which are all the same place in essence. Everything else is found in Mael, including , in time, the Fae. 

I have opted for Mael because it uses similar letters to both mortal the fae, but perhaps a bit less…Felurian, and a little bit more masculine instead since it’s most famous inhabitant was also male. So lets officially name it the Mael then as a nod to that young mastershaper who once hailed from this broken land and who would one day leave that moonless place on his quest to conquor the mortal sky, a quest which would ultimately lead to the creation of our third named realm.

5 ~ Faelight 

SO! introduction over and we ready to begin. This is how I see our trio of creation events unfolding. All the names which Aleph ‘found’, he used to create his mortal realm, these names are still there as they have been ever since he named them. This would leave everything that went into building the similar creation project that Jax used to create the faen realm was different from those names which Aleph had already used and so can only have been made out of the left over un-names from that original split. That is why the rules are different between mortal and fae, they are opposite sides or the same thought that have no common ground. So First we have Aleph who divided the Nameless Void into two realms. One of names and one of un-names creating the Mortal and the Mael. Then along came Jax who used the exact same creation equation with which he divided the Mael again by sorting the remaining un-names of mael into two more piles , one of them would of course always remain as his old ‘broken’ home of darkness did and the other would become his newly ‘shaped’ home of Fae which had itself a tiny bit of light to see by.  AKA the Mael and The Fae. We might assume that this sort of mathematics would now mark the mortal realm to be twice the size of either or the same size as both the mael and fae combined, but that argument gets all quantum before too long and you’re none of you really ready go down that path yet. Just accept that the creation of the fae made a total of three realms and not two as Felurian insists.

‘No. I have said. This was before. There was but one sky, one moon. One world.

Loath as I am to call her a liar, but she is demons-trably quite wrong about that statement. Perhaps she doesn’t really consider the mael as another seperate realm at all and that the mael and the fae share a common sky? Perhaps that dark place simply wasn’t relevant to her story, or perhaps speaking of it was considered off limits, like talking about the Cthaeh is meant to be. But if Jax world had no moon or stars before his quest began then his birthplace was quite obviously in a different realm from Aleph’s world of man. And that was long before the faen third came to be.

Further evidence for the existance of extra realms might be gleaned from Pat’s book with the earliest time-frame setting, Old Holly, where we hear about a man who came to the tower, and who left with the lady, who then returned alone. Then at the end of the book, the lady says that she has to leave again but also that she will return again. Now if we assume, as I do, that this is a story about the Aleu and the dawn of creation itself then the tower in the tale will be symbolic of the whole world (which Aleph founded and upon which everything grew.) If that line of thinking is correct then anyone leaving the tower would necessarily travel to somewhere else entirely, and there was nowhere else and so it would follow that there is reason to think that these ancient ‘name knowers’ like the lady could only depart from the world to a place which was therefore elsewhere, and this passing between realms has then long been an option.

For another angle about the possibilities of the Mael’s purpose in life we might also draw upon a single line from Skarpi which mentions Lanre going to search for Lyra in ‘the land of the dead’ which if it is an actul place to which a man could actually travel, and if the reports aren’t talking mistakenly about him visiting the faen realm here, then the land of the dead can only be another oblique reference to the Mael, unless that is a fourth place of course! This would also open up the likely suggestion that this might have been the exact same place where he gained his ‘knowledge best left alone, and gained it at a terrible price.’ This line of thought will clearly then mark the Cthaeh as also once being a creature of the Mael since he also existed before the fae, and that would tally with Bast’s account of his appearances in the Iax/Lanre timeline, but more on that later.

Not to be outdone, even Trapis tale has some mentions of another realm besides mortal.

‘Tehlu grabbed the demon and broke it in his hands,cursing it’s name and sending it back to the outer darkness that is the home of it’s kind.’

*interesting to note he uses the word ‘is’ here, and not ‘was’.

Of course Trapis might well be talking about the fae in this instance, and following that thought could be used as proof positive that the fae really are the demons in his tale. But if you, like I do, would rather think that the these demons he speaks of were something apart from the fae completely, then they needs must have then always had a seperate home of their own where these broken and name-cursed things could be safely banished to, a place which is neither of mortal nor of fae and so Qed that is going to be the Mael again. The Mael’s location is described then as being found in the outer darkness, a reference line which is nicely confirmed in the fourth act of Daeonica, when we hear a line referencing ‘all the demons in the outer dark’

If it can be visited then I believe that this land of demonic darkness is the same one that can be found off the edge of the faen map, in a place that is both near to the fae but also out beyond the faen limits where the faen starlight cannot reach and where the moonlight has never, ever shone. This Mael is then going to be the same place where Felurian took Kvothe shaed gathering, outside of the fae proper and into a place where dangerous, possibly demonic, things are known to exist and where all of the still un-named raw materials deemed necessary for shaping and/or unfolding into freshly named faerie things are to be found, a description which would tick all the boxes as being the true location of our mysterious Mael.

The Dark Side

Hespe’s tale tells us that Jax came from a strange place without a moon, a broken land where his old broken house was found at the end of the broken road, a road which nobody ever came down. We can now also suggest with confidence that his homeland was the Mael and whilst it might bear some similarities to mortal it must be said that it is a different place entirely from the world which Aleph created. Possibly the Mael could be regarded as being the shadow of mortal, the nightmare to its dream, or maybe it’s reflection. A place where every long-name is a broken-name. Idk but Aleph’s world world was demonstrably different because it famously had a full moon shining in it’s sky every night, and the sky above Jax old house did not, which clearly marks his broken house as being in a secondary place, a different place, a twin realm perhaps.

/We are told that even here in the Mael the days did indeed end and so did have a night to follow it, but even though Jax Maelnight sky had neither moon nor stars to illuminate it was still deemed as being a sky which is where Felurians earlier ‘two skies’ statement is shown to be already in error./  These two realms may well have stayed ignorant of each other until the arrival of the tinker but it would be true to say that unlucky Jax maelnight sky could also have been always considered as a moonless night, one that must therefore be generally considered as very, very dark. Calling it a pure black sky is a description that will match up rather nicely with a location from Felurians own story where she gives us a clue as to where Iax was actually standing when he tried to steal the moon, revealing that the sky above his old broken house and that of his new unfolded house both had similarly dark skies.

‘This shaper of the dark and changing eye, stretched out his hand out against the pure black sky. He pulled the moon but could not make her stay, so now she moves ‘twixt mortal and the fae.

So was Jax then standing in the Mortal, or the Fae? Since he pulled instead of pushed we know that he was not standing in mortal at the time and since the faen sky was his ultimate destination for her then that should rule out his standing in the Mael, too. Obvious statement, yes, but a necessary detail for us to envisage a triangle of non/conjoined realms, and not just thinking of a pair of options. This third realm is of course the true Fae as we know it which both our ladies stories inform us was also the moonthiefs creation which suggests to me that in building the Fae Jax must have used the same dividing trick that Aleph once did and used his hard won powers to unfold a second piece of ‘whole cloth’ from the original fabric of the universe in order to create his third realm, one that had internal lighting installed. The Fae will now be connected to, but also seperate from, both the mortal realm that Aleph made and from the outer dark where the demons are still said to live.

Travel between mortal and fae is well documented via the greystones path and further travel from the fae to the mael is possible by walking away from the light and into the shadows and so to complete this full faen triangle would require a third path along which to travel directly between mael and mortal. Fortunately for mortals, the direct path between mortal and demon has always been considered to be a broken road down which nobody ever goes making the progressions between the three worlds linnear and not triangular. The fae, however, shares a border with them both placing it in the central position of the three with two neighbouring races instead of just one.

So what do we hear of the mael from Bast then? Well he tells us the language spoken by one of it’s creatures was recognised by him for it’s sound more than it’s words. It sounded like faen, but very old, archaic even which tells us that the modern fae language must have been derived from it, a fact which supports my theory of it’s pre-faen existence. Bast also distances all of his kind from the mael by declaring that

‘They are not ‘my kind’ the Mael doesn’t even share a border with us, its as far away as anything can be in the fae.’

Which is rather interesting as it seems to admit that the mael and the fae both exist as seperate places, that they are both linked and yet they are also unconnected at the same time. The real difference between the Mael and the Fae will be ultimately be defined by the presence of moonlight, or the lack of it, in their respective skies.

During the time after the substance of fae had been unfolded but before the first stars were wrought and before Iax stole the moon, the Mael and the Fae would have been two like similar patches of the same outer darkness, two ends of the same ‘whole cloth’ from which everything is apparently unsewn. From what we are shown, both of these dark places appear to be an endless expanse of trees with plenty of room for demons and fae alike, as long as you trod carefully. But when the shapers truly desired a place without either any men or demons, a place to call their very own where they could do whatever they desired, they chose to create a realm which was neither a part of the outer darkness nor a part of Aleph’s inner light. I believe their plan must have involved illuminating a piece of the darkness from off the edge of the map and then used their shapeing powers to build the necessary exclave boundary fences out of their own newly fangled starlight, thus creating a borderline of light and dark between them and their neighbours, a line which their Mael demon neighbours could not cross. They starlit their own private faen section, perhaps as a source of their power to keep it clearly defined and seperate from the utter darkness of the outside Mael and thus the dark realm was split in twain again and now two did became three.

Now it does appear to me that starlight alone could have been enough for these early shapers to achieve an independence from their neighbours since any sort of light is ananthema to shadow and if the shapers had stopped there, then perhaps things would have worked out differently…

‘But one shaper was greater than the rest. For him the making of a star was not enough. he stretched his will across the world and pulled her from her home.’

You might be wondering where I'm actually going with all this and why the Mael is important in the grand plan of these things. Well, the more you know the more you believe  so I will answer that question with another one.

One of the most popular questions that Pat fans speculate on is ‘what is behind the doors of stone?’ and I can tell you that the answer is… Iax. 

Skarpi tells us the enemy invader was placed there after the drossen tor and Felurian also puts him there after his moon theft. Both mortal and faen realms agree then that he is definitely no longer in their own realms any more. So for both of these answers to be considered correct will guarantee the existence of this third place, and that’s where the mael comes into the equation.

Of course the Doors of Stone is also a good description of the exact type of greystone arch which we know can connect the mortal and faen realms and so that stone door connection should also be the leading theory on how to link directly into the mael, too. This gives us every reason to remember that doors are locked for a reason and the task of holding back the Mael from Mortal and all that it portends would be exactly the sort of thing I would want to build the strongest doors in creation to protect myself against. Of course if we are talking about the single door in the Archives, well that would only represent the door that blocks the first ever mael into mortal road, this would likely be the exact place where the tinker departed from and Jax first enterered into  the mortal world to began his easterly moon quest. But one is not two and doors of stone is plural so for the fae to also feel the need for their own door to shut the shaper of the dark and changing eye behind would require an identical door to do an identical job, and all the clues in the world will now point towards the Faen/Mael part of these doors of stone as being the one secretly located at the other end of the Old stone road, on the oldest part of the lackless family estates. A door which holds the flood indeed.

Felurian might hold a few more answers but she refuses to tell us much about such dark places and even if she was willing to reveal more, her insight might still not be conclusive enough since I believe that the Mael was a distant precursor to the whole of her new Faen home anyway.

7 ~ Track Record

Day and Night

Now that we finally have one foot in the Fae, some form of map may be rather useful before continuing. Half a page or so of hints is not much to go on but it should be enough since life in the Fae is governed by two things, dark and light, and the further out from the centre you go, the darker it all gets. To gather the materials for Kvothe’s shaed took an expedition out into the outer limits where strange and dangerous things live. The sky darkened and the stars dwindled but there were still trees in this part of Fae, vast trunks and dark branches like a cathedral towered all around them. One unseen but terrifying presence was attracted by foolish Kvothe when he decided to make some light to see by, stupid boy. Now it may very well have been the light itself that attracted it, that is the most likely explaination, however it should be noted that he didn’t use something as mundane as a tinderbox, oh no, he used sympathy in a motion-to-light binding (Capacatorial Kinetic Luminosity?) and since he was stark naked and had no piece of metal to focus on, I can only assume his power source was his own red mortal blood which might be part of an answer too. Whatever he did, something came to investigate and Felurian had to act swiftly with the rebuke ‘ciar nalias’ which may well mean ‘Stop That!’ or ‘Put That Light Out’ but it could equally translate as ‘No Sympathy.’ which I prefer because Pat’s a funny guy. Kvothe broke the binding but the damage was done and their presence was now known to this other presence.

Felurian acted swiftly again to hide them and this time had to speak a word or name of power of her own, softer than a whisper it was gentle and edgeless, but then so are most of her words. This may have been to hide them beneath a web of stillness but a second word was necessary too, one that stilled Kvothe from total movement. Even this was not enough to confound the demonic presence and thirdly, Felurian breathed in the air from his mortal lungs and replaced it with her own honeysuckle silence. ‘For an endless moment my heart ceased beating in my chest’ and then the danger was gone, the disturbance ripple that Kvothe had caused in this part of the fae was calm again since there was nothing now left of him for anything to notice, not even a heart beat to pump his ruh blood about. Kvothe was completely still and silent and technically ought to be dead too but it did the trick, the presence departed, and his heart thumped again. For that moment he was completely controlled by the eternal breath of Felurian, first lady of twilight who relaxed and then laughed wildly as if she had played the most marvelous joke…probably upon death itself.

Of course that doesn’t help with our maps but it needed saying anyway. Back in the darkness they continued further out into the stillness where sound is soft and darkness absolute. This is the limit of their faen journey and even the starlight has left them. In theory, continuing through the dark could have bought them full circle back into the light once again but I’m glad we don’t have to go the long way around, three dimensions are enough to struggle through without dawn bringing more trouble.

There was something sentient and light beyond the darkness though, things that live out in the deep of the night and when they came to Kvothe he thought of them as Tom Sparks, Will o Wisps, or Dennerlings with lanterns full of corpse light. Bioluminescence. Anything is possible in the fae after all, but they were actually moths of some sort, which shone a pale and silvery light which lit their path onwards.

‘We walked a long while after that. Felurian leading between the trunks of ancient trees. Once I felt grass soft beneath my bare feet instead of moss, then there was soft soil, as if we were crossing a farmer’s fresh-tilled soil.For a time we followed a twisting path of smooth paved stone that led us over the arch of a high bridge. All the while the moths followed us, giving me only the dimmest impression of our surroundings. Eventually Felurian stopped. By now the darkness was so thick I could almost feel it like a warm blanket around me. I could tell by the sound of the wind in the trees and the motion of the moths that we were standing in an open space.

There were no stars above us.

Grimward and Grinning

We are told that there are no compass points in Fae, but we can navigate by the stars if you know all their stories. The shapers who built the fae also made a star each ‘to light their new and empty sky’ 

Fae spotlights as cloaks ? and so the further from their light that you get, the further into the outer dark you go. Conversely the brighter it gets, the nearer to the centre you are. I imagine this would make Fae look like an LP record with Shaed Land being track one, Moth World making up track two, and The Twilit Pool being track three. Later on, Kvothe walked inwards through the trees of track four towards the brightening light of the horizon until all the trees finally ended their faen song… all bar one.

‘The trees gave way to a grassy plain. All the parts of the Fae Felurian had shown me had been forested. So this seemed a clear sign I was well outside of the bounds where I ought to be.

So imagining our record scenario again means that if the trees are what make up all the song grooves and track listings then this grassy plain would be the bit where the label is stuck and the run off groove disappears, and in the middle of that is the hole where the whole album spins around and around on a spindle. And nobody ever goes here on pain of death… Well, that’s the theory anyway.

This centre, a deceptively large area which is at least half a mile from the the central lone tree in all directions, which is a good bowshot for all of the Sithe archers to shoot crows over, is therefore the pin that marks the absolute centre of the Faen realm and is the area subjected to the most perpendicular brighness since it is permanantly bathed in the source of all faelight. An eternal daylight to match Felurians eternal twilight and this is almost certainly what makes it a perfect prison for a shadow oracle. The Cthaeh cannot leave it’s tree because it is elementally a creature of darkness and therefore cannot stand the touch of any exposure to the faen light in much the same way as it doesn’t like the smell of iron on Kvothe and moves further away from that too. Fire and Iron in any form are anathema and the light burns him like the iron bites him. It might not die but it can be hurt. This means that this entity called Cthaeh will now have to spend it’s entire eternal existence imprisoned on a dark island in a white field and only protected by the umbrella shaed of it’s own tree, which would I suppose make it officially ‘yoked to shadow…’ just like Lanre is back in Mortal.

Mael

"Upon him I will visit famine and a fire. 

Till all around him desolation rings 

And all the demons in the outer darkness 

Look on amazed and recognise 

That vengeance is the business of a man."

The Mael

If you think of Aleph as the sun, his realm is one of sunlight everything else is shadow, and that is the realm of Jax. What causes the shadow is what lies between. O # ∅

7 ~ Tinker Tangle

Tinker Tangle

‘A tinkers debt is always paid,

Once for any simple trade,

Twice for freely given aid,

Thrice for any insult made.

πΠπ

There are two tinkers of major note encountered so far, Trebon tinker and Eld tinker. Ignore all the others for now, these two are the important ones we need to focus on today.

The Trebon tinker is best considered using hindsight. First up, Kvothe was not looking to buy anything but would soon need to get rid of his horse, just as the tinker really needed to acquire one which was quite the coincidence. This is a trade where the tinker admits that he the is the one in need of aid most which puts him on the back foot in negotiations. Fortunately for him he just happened to have a small, rare and valuable means of payment that would fit in your pocket better than a horse would. It also came in useful for finding draccus scales and was basically the perfect currency for paying off devi since the University is the place to be for the best prices on this prized rarity. It may even come back into play later in the books as this stuff is clearly important… I wonder if she still has it? The original loan was 20 talents, the horse and tack cost 15 and this sky-iron was sold back to exactly wipe out the loan… plus 1 talent making 21 (or three times seven) Lucky Kvothe is actually 4 talents to the good now although he is also sixty miles from home but without an expensive horse to worry about

Then we get down to the real tinkering. Already ahead on the horse deal, Kvothe bargains sharply with what was thrown in for free, the saddle and tack. This should really come in as a bonus trade and thererfore is a second deal which lyrically falls under the tinkers debt of freely given aid. After some bargaining Kvothe asks for a new shirt, not something the tinker himself offers. The tinker eventually offered a blanket (good), brand (good), strawberry wine (?) and rope (?). Kvothe didn’t think he actually needed anything other than a new shirt, but the tinker was the one offering bonus items and his advice is legendarily renowned as always the correct thing to follow, everyone knows that. Kvothe really should have taken what was offered but instead holds out for his new shirt, a blanket, a bottle of brand and 3 jots. Money is always nice but he didn’t have it long as he soon unexpectedly had to pay Denna’s bill, which cost him 5 jots, and so his profit dissapeared like so much faerie gold. The brandy he thought might help clean his wound later, although Devi had already sorted that out for him properly, but it did come in very useful to help wheedle important information he needed to know out of the weird old swineherd, Schiemmelpfenneg (nice bit of old timfoil in that name! qv) but nobody could have possibly forseen that turn of events coming…

The blanket also came in useful for keeping both him and an unknown Denna warm on a cold night spent atop the greystone, far from the nights fire but safe from the unknown Draccus. The tinker had always offered these two things in all his bargaining and a tinkers good advice is legendary, but it would be surely impossible to predict a scenario exactly why either should become necessary so far in advance when Denna and Draccus wasn’t even part the equation yet. Nobody could have predicted that she would be waiting for him, or the arrival of a draccus, yet listening to the tinker would have also given him another bottle, a bottle of Denna’s favourite strawberry wine which is as direct a link as possible in these books. It is almost as if the tinker knew that she was waiting for him in Trebon and that it would be a nice bonus for Kvothe to enjoy with her later, and that would make our tinker a prophet. The tinker did twice offer the useful rope which clever Kvothe twice rejected and he twice regrets not having one as it’s lack tore his new shirt and confounded his plans to properly off the Draccus! (never travel far without a rope: Samwise Gamgee) but again, who could possibly have forseen the need for such exact things?? It is unfair to expect Kvothe to predict that in the near future he will 1) meet the most perfect strawberry wine link again in Denna and 2) need a twice useful rope link for dealing with an unknown Draccus threat.

However it is also true to say with hindsight that accepting the tinker’s offer would have clearly been more useful than having another three jots in his purse and a new shirt which would tear later that night anyway , and hurt himself into the bargain. At the end of the day, he did ok but could have done so much better. He really should have listened to the offers of help from the fortuitous Trebon Tinker as if he had a big sign around his neck stating that Here was someone that can accurately predict the unfolding of unknown events well in advance and can helpfully prepare you to deal with them accordingly.

Everybody knows that tinkers always know best.

Tinker Tangle Too

On the other side of the world, we meet our second tinker. This one is described as traditionally dressed and is thus like the one depicted in the corner of our maps to represent a classic image of a worldly traveller who nobody would ever dream of insulting. Even our four corners outsider Tempi knows that it is bad luck to insult a tinker.

‘Proper travelling tinkers are a rare breed of people, and I am always glad to see one. My mother told me they were lucky, and my father valued them for their news, The fact that I was in desperate need made this meeting three times welcome.’

This meeting was fortunate for Kvothe who had not prepared himself properly for this step into the unknown, which gives the tinker the upper hand in any trading. Kvothe wants salt (and a box to keep it in) which was the first thing on his mind (although I cannot fathom a decent reason why???) A good knife (and a sheath to put it in) followed and the tinderbox was ready and waiting before he finished asking. These last two are technically iron and fire which are the main way we know of dealing with demons… that salt bothers me though, it must mean something. Hmmmm…

With the essentials done with the tinker makes his own suggestion of pen, paper and ink which Kvothe umms and arrs about until the tinker's clever packass mule brays and the lethani becomes obvious. Yes the paper was good for easing his fears about Denna (although that effort prived ultimately useless) but more importantly it was needed for later writing a letter to Maer, in the correct style and manner, informing him where Kvothe and his gold have gone. I suppose that it made it through the fae, nice and dry wrapped up in a weatherproof case. Then we have the bargaining which includes some quite nice mathematics in calculation and exchange rates that nods it’s head in the traditional way of classic tinkers. All found Kvothe gains a great deal for his new cloaks for old trade and come the end of the adventure he will of course have a better one anyway, but he didn’t know this at the time… I mean who would? Lastly comes the waxing part, the third deal. The tinker offers four tallow candles which are nothing to do with either bees or bay but pretty funny if you know see the joke, and they are also perfect for keeping a tight rein on his new charges. Kvothe accepts the tinkers wise offer once again, but he risks an insult by baulking at the final hurdle and refusing the tinker's waterproof wax for his boots. He later regrets this folly to his detriment because he wasn’t paying attention to the weather forecast words of wisdom that the tinker sang when they met. Furthermore, All the tinkers items were individually protected from the heavily predicted rain showing once again that each and every tinkers suggestion should have been well heeded as they were all designed for his own individual benefit.

The underlying plotline here is that both tinkers have an uncanny knack for knowing the future better than anyone has a right to do. They turn up exactly when they are needed and always suggest exactly what will become useful in the unknown future. And on both occasions the next big thing looming on the horizon turned out to involve the chandrian.

 But looming behind the chandrian on the Mauthern pot and in the Eld both is another encounter that nobody could have seen coming. The Cthaeh.

8 ~ Butterflies

9 ~ Dictum

Tangles Dictum

‘Seven. You can hold to that with some certainty. It’s part of their name, actually. Chaen means Seven. Chaen-dian means “Seven of them”.Chandrian.

Now Ben is university educated, and that is where he has learned a bit of ancient Temic, a language that predates ‘the old Tema that only priests know’ by a thousand years. But we should also remember that the university is Amyr run, and that they are at least as old as Thelu’s first priests and would also speak the old language of the world. Furthermore, nothing Amyr influenced should be taken at face value in these books, or indeed in their own books, and Dian is not Drian just as Chaen is not Chan. Inconsistancies indicate errors and given that Pat has stated that he poured an awful lot of time and thought into creating names for this language, and since Names Are Important, it is only fair that I do the same in order to decipher it back again, and I would expect things to be error free.

The Chaendrian are a groupe of various number. (Likely seven, given their name.)

Our folk history author writes his words to show an oddly spelt old Vintish dialect where lots of quainte olde wordes are given an extra letter ‘e’ for some rustic reason. Since the writing was from two hundred years ago, and Caudicus tells us that spelling wasn’t considered so important in ‘those days’ it may indicate spelling alterations were a common occurrence, which may or may not be important, but the author only assumes that the number and their name are connected.

‘You would do better to call them the Seven though. ‘Chandrian’ has so much folklore hanging off it after all these years. The names used to be interchangable, but nowadays if you say Chandrian people think of ogres and rendlings and scaven. Such Silliness.’

The Cthaeh cannot lie. And he all but 100% confirms that Yes there are Seven of them, and his word is always true. But that doesn’t mean that the whole word ‘Chandrian’ translates exactly into ‘seven-of-them’, He doesn’t actually confirm that as being a fact, and so it might not be so after all.

My beef with Ben lies with the structure of the words. If ‘dian’ means of them, then what does ‘drian’ mean? Adding a letter for unknown reason is grating as I cannot translate that part well enough myself to argue my case. But ignoring Ben’s assertion that ‘Dian-Drian’ both translate as ‘of-them’ for now, the numerical indicator spellings Chan- and Chaen- are quite obviously not the same thing. There is a whole extra letter ‘e’ written in the ‘older’ spelling which looks as though it has been ‘cut away’ from the shorter and more commonly known version and therefore is clearly a more recently adapted spelling. The Cthaeh, who knows all, gives us a tip as to the preferred faen way of naming procedure when different spellings may needlessly complicate matters. It suggests that the easiest way to avoid confusion is to simply don’t use either spelling and just abbreviate the whole meaning down to it’s most salient part, and then to use actual numbering instead and just call them ‘The 7.’ But I don’t want to blindly do what he says, I want to know more about such things.

Seven words

Now The Chaendrian are a world famous phenomena, and so the chances on everyone in every country and in every language all coming up with the exact same way of spelling are going to be slim, narrative septagy shouldn’t apply to proper names so why didn’t folk just stick with Chaendian once and for all in every language where they were known? The description should always be the same unchanging combination in every language. As far as the number 7 goes, we have it on good authority that in Siaru the old term ‘Chan Vaen edan Kote’ spells the number 7 as ‘chan’ which is only four letters long, not five as it is in the Temic ‘Chaen’. Even the Ademic have a word in their secret language for the Seven, which is another Old language from the days before the chaen-dian were first… created? That word which is indeed talking about the same ‘handful’ of powerful bad things is ‘Rhinta’ which bears no resemblance to any of our seven words so far, but that is a better word to use than chandrian, apparently, and there are other words quite similar too rhinta which do make appearances elsewhere.

In the Commonwealth, where they generally speak Aturan, we have a Big clue from Pat, but only in the 10AE spelling. In the original printing, Trapis tells us

‘But on the Seventh day, Tehlu drew near before Encanis could bring his power to bear and the seventh city was saved. That is why Seven is a lucky number and why we celebrate on Caenin.

This gives us the modern Aturan spelling for the seventh day, and it sort of looks a little bit like our other 7 words. ‘Caenin’ is also what much travelled and knowledgable Arliden probably uses himself in life and so it isn’t surprising that he didn’t know the archaic name for the seventh day of the week too, although Laurian did have a good ear for such things. HOWEVER, in the 10AE the word Caenin has been deliberately replaced by Pat with the equivalent word in Temic, ‘Chaen’ which is the old word for the seventh day in the old language which would have been spoken by the people like Perial who were actually living in the story at this time. Deliberate changes to the text for no obvious reason are signposts from Pat telling us that we are following the correct path and investigating the correct things with our lucky 7 words. Without such clues, the puzzle is possibly too difficult to solve, but with them… we can continue with confidence, and perhaps a bit of a smirk on our faces.

Chaen is counted a lucky number from ancient times which remembers the seventh wondrous city of the old world, of which everything else, including it’s name, is now long forgotten. Every story we have tells us that the name given to the seventh day is based around the word for lucky Seven to celebrate the day on which the seventh city was spared from destruction. The Tehlin Church then arrived on the scene and promptly gave its own names to the next four days. Now these are proper words with deep religious undertones. Felling replaced 8-day. Reaving replaced 9-day. 10-day was changed to Cendling and the last day of the span, the old 11-day, was completely hijacked and turned into Mourning, which has become a general day of abstinence and religious reflection and is the new focal point of the entire span which only helps draw common folks attention away from the significance of the number seven buried away in the middle. But the practice of counting the first seven days has been deeply engrained in the very fabric of Temerant life since the lost days of Ergen, Perial’s villagers came for her son on the first day of the seventh span. Collectively, the days one to six might also represent the six cities which did later fall. But the church was not instantly all-powerful and change was slow in the coming to the far reaches of the four corners and it was many years before the iron law and the book of the path finally forced the world to change it’s calender to fit with their holy ideals. Even Trapis corrects himself when he remembers ‘No, wait, there wasn’t any Mourning yet’ and so it seems that instead of the rather sweeping change of completely renaming everything, they simply incorporated the old traditions in so much as they even used the old numbering system in their own spans and furthermore introduced the ‘seven days of high mourning’ where they meddled with the countings of such things to their own satisfaction.

And so logically, and rhetorically, if follows that if Chaen means the seventh say, the first 6 days names will reflect the previous six numbers, too, and if that is true then this tells us that Luten. Shuden. Theden. Feochen. Orden. & Hepten are representative of the phonetic equivalents of the first six numbers the original language of the Egren empire, Temic.

Rosetta Stone

If we can take the calendar as an approved key, we should be able to confidently take one huge step towards translating some further pieces of Temic we are given. Writing our list of days down next to each other reveals a running theme throughout in that the numbernames all end with the same suffix. ‘-en’. Putting on my tinfoil helmet once again makes me think it quite probable that this suffix is an addition to the root numbering structure and that it is likely going to be something that has been added to the root seperately to indicate what exactly we are counting, (like one potato, two potato,) and so the whole is officially something that is ‘other’ than the real number itself. One good thought is that it acts like a pronunciation indicator fir-st. (1st) Seco-nd. (2nd) Thi-rd. (3rd) Four-th. (4th) Etc whilst another thought suggests that ‘-en’ is the suffix used when counting days specifically which indicates that they correct translation of our list is actually 1-day. 2-day. 3-day. 4-day. Since I like both theories I am going to propose that they are both correct and the construction is actually a two-part binding, a lot like those used in Sygaldry and Sympathy both.

If we assume that all the ‘-En’ part always means ‘-Day’ in it’s meaning, and if we were counting something other than days then this suffix would need not apply. Without it the root numbers will be

Lut = 1. Shud = 2. Thed = 3. Feoch = 4. Ord = 5. Hept = 6. Cha = 7.

This is now sounding, to me, a lot like the phonetic names that we give to our musical notes, namely Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti. Music knows how to follow a meter. Language too has a structure and numbers will always follow set rules when they are combined. It is not expected that this is going to be like a tally score, one scratch for each letter in each number, which would make one a one letter word, two a 2, three a 3, and although 4 actually is four letters, but there are limits to such an infinite scale as the last digit on any list, the number nine, would have a name that was nine letters long! and that is going to prove very unwieldly when we reach the upper levels of unlikely mathematics that will involve doing multiplication sums to combine two different word numbers together to make even more complex numberwords later on in this study.

In a perfect world, all things would be equally allotted the exact same amount of letters so that they could all display their long names equally, a triangle of three parts in the simplest form, one letter for each bit of their three part name. But this is not a perfect world, alas, perhaps, and Our assorted number/letter count is all different where we really deserved to see everything laid down in apple pi order. Since everything I have seen up until now indicates that any name is really a three part name, and considering we are going to need all the luck we can get, when it comes to breaking these numbers down into names again, I believe that we should use a maximum of three letters in our counting words to ascertain each of our true seven day-relating number words. Applying this 3-part thinking to the word Feochen for example will allow us to split it into three syllables, fe+och+en. We have already accounted the ‘-en’ part to indicate that we are counting a number of days, but Fe-och meaning 4 still looks far too complex to me.

Sticky Stuff

Remembering our other lessons in Pat magic though might help us to put everything together in a way that will satisfy our understanding of the universal laws that apply to all things Temerant. Ben begins teaching sympathy by using pitch pine as a sort of placebo glue to help things fit easier together. It wasn’t strictly necessary, only a glue for the mind, but once you understand the principals at that level of magic it helped supplying a basic yet familiar understanding of unfamiliar concepts when it comes to unfamiliar practices, a lot like Kvothe has to explain to both Marten and Denna about ‘invisible string’ where a technical explanation would be out of the quiestion. This magic glue also makes an appearance in sygaldry lessons when Kvothe explains that when you are working with runes, some runes for different things fit nicely together, whilst others do not. It is a universal rule that some things, like numbers, just fit better than others do, such is the way of things. Kvothe explains the complicated process of how to stick two runes together with the use of ‘linking runes’ such as ‘Ule and Doch are both for binding’ and so when it comes to unfamiliar concepts we do at least have a grasp of accepted practice on what might be possible in our entry level Temerant language construction class too.

It appears to me as though the ‘Fe-‘ part in Feochen may be an example of how two pieces of our puzzle simply do not fit very well, at least not without an extra linking rune in between, and if that is so then we can recognize the magic glue for what it is. Fe-en alone might not create a satisfactory combination of ‘4-day’ by itself, and so to make it work at such a desired level the universe has declared that it was necessary to use the linking rune ‘doch’ between them which has the right linkage to fit with both edges at once. This would create the new word Fe-Doch-En to mean Four (th) day. Yes, I am aware that Doch is not Och, but there are 197 different runes in the sygaldry alphabet and we do not know them all. Just enough to make some educated guesses. So when looking back at our original calender I will predict that the correct constructions are as follows.

Lu (t) en , Shu (d) en , The (d) en , Fe (och) en , Ord-en , Hep (t) en , Cha-en.

We will note that five and seven are similar in that they do happen to fit nicely without any magic glue, but the general trend is to break up the vowels and consonants in a way that doesn’t need to use any added accents, such as ‘Ë’ to do the dirty work when it comes to pronouncing diphthongs.

There is indeed some evidence that what I am suggesting is in all actuality the correct method for the construction of converting numbers into names when we look to the language of Siaru. In Pat’s most famous example we are given four words by Kilvin that translate into a five word sentence!

‘Chan Vaen edan Kote‘ , we are told on good authority, means ‘Expect Disaster Every Seven Years.’ This will clearly mean that in that ancient and secret language, One of these words is going to have to do double-duty and represent two words at some point. Those who may disagree with my reasoning might possibly suggest that this will simply be a case similar to our own worlds words ‘century’, ‘decade’ or ‘lustrum’ which mean a period of ‘100 years, 10 years and 5 years’ respectively, and it is true that such terran language tricks might well be the answer here in Temerant too. But in the case for my methods defence, I will point out that if ‘Cha’ is the universal base for ‘7’ then it can act in a similar vein to our adding ‘-en’ to mean 7-day, so adding ‘-n’ might turn it into ‘7-year’ instead, which gives me two examples that both follow the same pattern. This translation would also leave the three remaining words ‘Vaen edan Kote’ to cover ‘every, expect and disaster.’ which would simplify a much easier basic word substitution for the rest of the saying into 1-2-3 order.

Breakdown

Since I have arrived at this conclusion using the lucky numbers 3 & 7, again, and if you have read my Irony papers that I call a trilogy in π parts, then you should know that I always like to check my working to it’s limits and so we should always try to break these things apart in a test of destruction.

In my answers, I have arrived at Lu = 1 and The = 3. Now! Trapis tale of Tehlu and the demon lord now has some interesting visual aspects as Teh-Lu now clearly uses the rune for One in his own name, and you could argue that he represents 1/3 part of Aleph’s holy trinity of ‘three-in-one’ which is all sounding rather good. In further stories about ancient things we can see ‘Lu’ everywhere as it occurs not only in Teh-Lu, but also in Lu-dis and even in Fe-Lu-rian giving us more reasons to believe in mynumbers. Mixing numbers into actual names has thus opened up many new areas for further interpretation, but for now let’s just see what happens when we try to reach for the luckiest of numbers, 21 which is best represented by solving the sum Three multiplied by Seven. Or using this new key, ‘The’ times ‘Cha’. Now multiplication is complicated, but it is clear to me that the most obvious answer might well turn out to be a very interesting anagram of the letters that form it’s numbered parts, suggesting that ‘lucky 3’ times ‘lucky 7’ might justequal unlucky ‘Cthaeh.’