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 anyone become a namer or is this skill inherent only to certain bloodlines? and more importantly, can this power that these blue bloods possess able to be passed on biologically to their blue blooded offspring (if any there be?) in order to continue that namers dynasty of power. That anyones 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 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 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 power to rule like ‘tiny gods’ over a land which was not their own and so were actively exploiting their 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 be that enemy? That would clearly be some other factions from the 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 also 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 the day that they 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 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 go with simply calling him a mutant because I just watched X-men again.

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 counted 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 was being 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. 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 she 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 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 ~ A brief history of Time#3

I am trying to wind up ancestry now, but there still a few things left to be said about the future consequences of plans before we can turn our attention back to the events of Tehlu Day itself, where God meets science and the names of all things should come magically together. 

One last push then and then we can start to recreate a game that was once played with all of these important Ruach as the nameless game pieces.

The Dark ages.

There is a big hole in our history of Temerant where nothing happened, or rather nothing was written about it, until now. This was not a good time for the world and not a good time for tinfoil as almost everything here is supposition with only a few hints to eek things out with. It is not my best work, but it’s all I’ve got, that’s not to say I’m incorrect though. We need another lucky number to get us through here. #7.

Chaen means seven. Ben says that this is a word from the language Temic, which predates Tema by 'about' a thousand years. It marks the seventh day in the language of the land and if you have to count periods of time in numbers then 7 is as good a place to end the counting as any other. Seven is also regarded as a lucky number as it remembers the only city to survive the fall of Ergen and to quote Trapis 'that is why we celebrate on Caenin'. The common people could count to seven and so using a lucky number was as good a number as any to define a weeks length. Perial’s story features the number seven a lot, for example the townsfolk came for Menda on the first day of the seventh span , or 42 days if my guess is correct possibly a little Pat joke about how long it took to come up with the answer for  Life, the universe and everything. But then we get something different. We have four more days, Felling, Reaving, Cendling, and Dearth, all tacked onto the end of the 7-day week which Trapis tells us are the names that were given to commemorate the final days of the Demon Lord Encanis’ reign and the end of a bad time for the world. These are Church given names but they still acknowledge the presence of the old seven day week as well since somethings are too ingrained in the population to be completely erased from history. The church itself commemorates this lucky number accordingly with their own seven days of high mourning which are held on the days of the year that lead up midwinters day. This is the last day of the year and is celebrated with a great pageant organised by the church across the 4Corners. It is a time for demons to be seen once more and stands as a rememinder as to exactly why Lord Tehlu should be revered as the one true Lord God and Saviour of all mankind.

But the church of Tehlu is not all that old in the grand scale of things, maybe a thousand years or so guesses Trapis, so what happened to all the uncounted years leading up to his tale? Time is broken and church time is very confusing. Even the moon cannot be trusted to tell the time, but we have one number that we can trust in absolutely. Haliax hasn’t slept for five thousand years. The Cthaeh said that and it cannot lie. Now, it is possible to suggest that 5k years in fae would be different to 5k years in mortal since time flows differently there although we do share the same moon…sort of. Cthaeh also reveals that he can count in mortal time as his reference to Kvothe seeing Cinder ‘a day or three ago’ reveals. Regardless of Fae, time marches onwards for Haliax has spent all of his 5000 years in the mortal realm searching for whatever he seeks to achieve his own plan. (Take that as written for now, I Know Shit.)

 We know from his youth when he was still called Lanre, that he fought at the Blak of Drosson Tor, a battle where the sword Caesura was also wielded by Finol of the clear and shining eye who was it’s 30th owner. Accurate records tell us that it has had 237 owners in total which gives an average since that battle of approximately 5000/207, which works out at about 24 years each, give or take a Lanre, which is a pretty vague number to count on but still one that we can statistically use to measure a Temerant generation with. Kvothe used a base of ten years  per owner in his own maths and thus came up with less years than we know to be true. Using this mean average we can at least guess at some other things, such as how old the Modegan lineage of Sovoy might be whose ‘blood goes back fifty generations, older than tree or stone.’ The same use of a generation can be used to work backwards from Finol, where using my mathematics, it implies that Chael shaped his blade over 700 years before Drossen Tor, giving us a guess at the length of the creation war at over seven centuries! But these are boring numbers with no substance as thirty owners may have died in one week and then there is the uncountable time that it has spent since, sitting on the shelf awaiting the right hand to come and ask it to dance again.

But if Haliax hasn’t slept since Myr Tariniel fell then that does date things accurately enough to put a pin in the ground. The day that he shaped the world afresh was 5000 sleepless years ago.

‘and since that time the land has broken and the sky has changed. Seven names have been carried through the crumbling of empire, through the broken land and changing sky.’

Folk still remember the number Seven as being a lucky number but we don’t get told anything more about this cataclysm or anything else about this missing time in our history books. Not. One. Word.

Languages of Temerant.

The next thing we know of modern history is the settling of the Shalda mountains some three thousand years later by Heldred, the founder figure of the Ceald nation. That is a long time to be a homeless nomad, wandering around the world in the aftermath of Lanre’s destructive action in search of mountains. The Cealds clearly desired a purpose to their life which led directly to them finding their own corner of the world, way up in the mountains where they foundried their own little empire and then stamped their name across the rest of the known world. That is a gap of many years and miles and, indeed, about 125 of my generations, but they are a clannish people and work well together. Women do some things and men do other things and everything gets done properly, especially the laundry. The Cealds also have their own secret language which might contain some historical records about what had actually just happened in the world but it is exactly that, a secret and it’s a bastard language to make any sense of, too.

We suspect the Loeclos box to be somewhat older than the Cealdim, but the only form of recorded history available about that secret would be from Yllish story knots which were being tied ‘long before man begun scratching pictograms on the skins of sheep’. Yllish may very well be the original Loeclos language but another part of Vintas spoke Eld Vintic until the conquering Aturan Empire, which wasnt even formed yet, bought in their own preferred lingua franca. Eld Vintic is the language from the area of land comprising both the ancient Eld and ancient Tinuë, which is the clear favourite to be built on the site of our lucky seventh city. Modegan is just a red herring and there is nothing to see there. We get two words of Modegan to play around with, about the same amount as we do of Yllish, but whatever was going on in the world around them the Modegans wanted no part of it. They seceded from the outside a very long time ago and their high king was the wisest man in the world. They built their new city among the ancient trees of the Eld and shut the door behind them.

Ademic, on the other hand, has always existed to faithfully record all of their oldest swords atas in a written form. Ademic is a language from the age of the Ergen Empire that was being used at the time of Drossen Tor, making it the oldest language in the world that we know of so far. Caesura is then also a word from this time and it occurs in Ademic and Eld Vintic both giving us a twin connection. Unlike Eld Vintic or Siaru or Yllish or Modegan, Ademic has been declared outlaw along with all those who speak it and is now so secret that nobody in all the four corners is supposed to know it even exists at all, especially not barbarians. The Adem are the silent people. They don’t talk to outsiders and certainly not in their own language, they learn the tongues of man when they do venture back into civilization. They speak with their hands when they talk amongst themselves and they don’t really ‘do’ singing either. The Adem, and all their memories of Ergen, were actively driven out of the four corners by the combined strength of the other languages, the eld vintics, the siarueans , the modegans, the Yllish and the assorted temeranti. Driven from the land wherever they tried to settle again, although it was pretty much the Aturan Empire doing all the pushing at the end. So what is the difference between Tema and Temic and Eld Vintic And Yllish and Siaru and Modegan and Ademic? I think that these were the surviving langauges of the various voices of Ergen, maybe it was one per city? Each with their own language and way of life. That would make the most sense to me. The ruach were inhabitants of the original cities but then came the fall and the assorted peoples of the land became as one under the language of their conquerers that arrived after the encroaching blackness swept through Myr Tariniel. This is when the demons first took over. Time passed, as it does, although what the moon was doing right now is another story. But finally Encanis and all of his kind were banished by ‘Tehlu, the Walking God’ who appointed several priests to care for the people after he too departed the world. The Tehlin priesthood decided to start repairing the broken world as they saw fit, and this incorporated giving the world a whole new language to speak where any mention of what may or may not have come before has been completely edited out.

The Temaranti

The Tehlin church is relatively new on the world scene but it can still remember its roots, written in it’s holy book in the old language of Tema is ‘The Hempen Verse’ and anyone who can still read it is entitled to a church trial.

‘Right. You see, there’s two lines in the Book of the Path, and if you can read them out loud in the old Tema only priests know, then the iron law says you get treated like a priest. That means a commonweath court can’t do a damn thing to you. If you can read those lines, your case has to be decided by the church courts.’

Being able to speak this ancient, forgotten and indeed forbidden language of Tema marks you as a special case to be tried by your peers in secret. It marks you as knowing about secret things, such as forbidden languages. Chaen is a number older than Tema, it is taken from Temic which Ben tells us ‘predates Tema by about a thousand years’ which makes it very old indeed. Aturan is the modern day language of Temerant but is neither Temic nor Tema in much the same way that English is neither Roman nor Greek. Knowing Tema would mark you as having ‘old blood’, which is always worth more than ‘new money’ and therefore as a speaker of it you would likely as not have the exalted blue blood of Ergen flowing in your veins. This Hempen Verse then acts like a 'get out of jail Free card' to be used if a Ruach ever found them self in barbarian trouble. The Modegans employ their own methods to keep bloodlines pure. the same sort of thing happens across society as a rule but further from the top it gets the weaker it becomes, the Modegans also breed horses based on pure bloodlines. Common people would be a nag by comparison although some rare folk may have occasional traces of ancient blood still in their pedigree, perhaps having ‘a touch of fae’ about them as Deoch say’s. Perhaps this power of the old blue blood will occasionally show up in common folk and announce itself as knacks, such as Trip always rolling Sevens. Common folk don’t like folk like that, weirdo’s who somehow grow the best tomatoes, were always finding good water or predicting the weather. They drive them away from society and so the blood grows thinner in that village. Outcasts are unwelcome but all of them are welcome to gather together under one blanket if they are lucky enough to encounter the wandering, travelling roadshow of the assorted mixed blood that makes up one family that is the edema ruh. All outcasts together.

But back to #7 again, remember that? The Aturan equivalent for Seven days is Caenin, but in the oldest language of the land, it is Chaen which meant Seven. There is an important alteration in the 10 AE where Trapis now, rather interestingly, uses the original Temic word for Seven instead of the Aturan.  Knowledgable Ben might know about these things but Arliden didn’t. Well travelled and with all the stories of the world in his head he still didn’t know where the original names for the first seven numbered days in a span came from, which is quite understandable because only the university might teach this dead language nowerdays, and only to arcanists like Ben. Laurian didn’t know this either although she did have a better ear for such things, perhaps it’s in her blood...

 This is very confusing now because Kvothe also gives us a statement which seems to order them both the other way around! When showing Simmon a book by Gibea, the secret Amyr, he tells us of the hidden code that ‘It’s not temic, it’s Tema, an archaic usage.’ and Kvothe has not yet learn’t to speak Tema in a day. But whichever of these came first it tells us that Selitos’ words of old ‘ivare enim euge’ are also from our eldest known form of these forbidden languages, the Language of Myr Tariniel was Tema or Temic and these are clearly the original roots of the name Temerant. It was this language which we heard spoken by Selitos to Aleph before the gathering of the ruach it translates as ‘for greater good’.

Lets take a breather there. That’s three lumps of tinfoil to take in and three is also a lucky number.

The blood of Ergen has something special about it and the Ruach all survived the fall of Ergen. We aren’t talking about future generations here, just the originals. Their names have been changed to protect the innocent. Indications are that they are probably all sterile and pretty much unchanging. They might now be considered as the nameless, the scaendyne, until someone reminds  them of it again. Sceop had forgotten his own name, Auri might well qualify as well. 

These nameless ruach Erganites who all survived Lanre’s betrayal personally. Therefore we can say with some certainty that the time span between Skarpi’s first and second tales can now be put down as ‘less than a ruach lifetime’, or rather within the lifespan of Ordal, the youngest Ruach angel, who's name is still remembered in the Tehlin’s Book of the Path. Tehlu is their god but it was Aleph who altered her forever. Not Tehlu, Aleph.

 

3 ~ 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, and that they were fully expected to remain there until the end of days. They also hold an important association with their 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 that description from the few clues we are given in the books is that Aleph is a shining example of 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 the lands 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 die, that mortal fate is denied them. Second thought is this line must be talking then about Aleph one day somehow forgetting the names of all things instead, including his own, thus giving up Their power and for Himself becoming officially recognised as being... nameless. Unfortunately for that thought, imho neither can Gods ever forget anything, or go mad, or even sleep for that matter because the Aleu are superior beings from a seperate plane of existence (the sky) that is way beyond the 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 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 you can magically conjour up one God out of the void then He must always have a twin, who is usually called the Devil. Why? Because in this instance God is light and you cannot create light without also making a shadow at the same rime, and so darkness is the colour that this devil always wears. Between them these two gods will control everything (except the moon of course , she is a third party anomaly with whom I shall deal with properly on another day) . This Anti-Aleph twin of God's counterpart in these books is called Iax. They are two halves of the same being, like the two ends or the same piece of string. You can Think of them variously as light and dark, One and zero. Alpha and omega ...It's all the same thing really. Two gods. Perfectly balanced. But absolute opposites in all the ways that matter. If one of them knows the light names of all things, then the other one knows their dark names for balance.

Aleph is the self same god who appeared in Perial's dream as a being 'made entirely of fire or sunshine.' Agents of darkness usually appear suitably clad in the colours of the opposition.

So. Let's start at the beginning. How were the Aleu born? Well I imagine that In the beginning there was the nameless void and at that point this void was all there was. 

Now I generally imagine this void to have looked a bit like a vast field of static. Lots and lots of little bits of stuff, a maelstrom of black bits and white bits all jumbled up together. 

That's when Aleph made his grand entrance. He somehow became aware of his surroundings and decided to separate all the white bits out of the void and put them together in one pile.

As an inevitable consequence of his actions, this meant that all of the black names were also separated out at the same time. These were the undesirable parts to Alephs desire and thus the concept of choice was created in the nameless void and now ther were two piles of all things. A black pile and a white pile. By dividing the whole void to his own personal choice.  Aleph created a duality. In the instant He became Lord of one side, another Aleu must have sprung into existence on the other to retain a  balance to the universe. Aleph is the Lord of light and gets to play with all the white things he had chosen. His opponent is the Lord of Shadows and gets to play with the black things on his side of the divide, and His name is Iax. They are then a lot like two sides of the same coin where White is heads and 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. 

If we try and describe these two realms in two dimensions the simplest image to conjour would be one of one single flat plane of existence but one that is double sided. One side is where all the light names reside and the other is where to find their opposite dark names. If we use Pats thinking of everything having a Three part name on this light side of the board then the same number should reciprocally be present on the dark side which suggests s the very long names of all things might then contain six named parts in total.

Aleph and Iax are my choices for the Aleu. Twin gods, both masters of their opposite realms.

Ih Hespe's story, the two do get to meet when the white Lord goes exploring on the dark side of their game board, And because choice has now been created, they decided to play a game.

π ~ Bet you a Jot

 We know all about Aleph but bugger all about Iax except that He is also rather good at naming. 

Now, in our books the name Iax is very close in appearance to that of another character, Jax, and it is entirely possible that they are one and the same person, just like Kote is Kvothe. Name changing is becoming a common theme here and bast tells us that it was Iax who stole the moon whilst Hespe claims this was all down to Jax instead, so which one was it? simply having similar 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, the two are just a brushstroke apart, just a tittle…but that is usually exactly where things begin to go wrong. 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 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 land. 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 good link. The most common Temerant use of the letter ‘J’ occurs in everyday life within our aforementioned word Jot, something that didn't exist until the Cealdish started coining them. 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, 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 and is therefore ideal for our purpose. From that ancient time of Temerant, ‘Ia’ is a 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 ‘incorrect’ 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 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, 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.

3 ~ Aleu part 2

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, whose name is best described as ‘number 1’ 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. The sum of all knowledge is this tinkers to bestow, and whatever you desire, the answer will be 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 turning point of the story is the introduction of the spectacles with which dark Jax can, for the very first time, see the light of the uncountable stars and the beguiling moon. 

Balls

The first pack contained examples of the names of all things. if you start with the marbles, they are basically many individual names with no real connection. Similar 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, the ball is now on a piece of string which givesthe holder some small measure of control over the balls it’s desired destination. Puppet’s are a more complex version of ball and cup as you have more balls to consider and more strings to control. The random nature of dice may teach you about numbers and permutations and possilities and considering a folding knife could offer you safe ways to cut the controlling strings away altogether. 

But there is still a lot of work to do putting all these names together.

In the second pack, we find more complex ideas. 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. Each ‘toy’ offered thus offers up increasing levels of control over our original ‘ball’. 

Finally Jax sees the ball he desires the most as the moon is also a ball and coincidentally described as being round as a cup, but it would take something much more entertaining than toys and more complex than machinery to put her under your control. Things that you hadn't thought of yet might be found in a book of secrets perhaps, or the answer may be reaced through mixing a few ideas together like you were mixing paint with different brushes. The answer probably requires fashioning a better cup to give it some more attractive properties such as employing rarities like loden stone, or rather sky iron into your schema. But to finally master full control requires patience and practice and 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 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 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

Iax didn't just win control of all Alephs names, he also took his walking stick, his magic spectacles, and his hat which I'm thinking are analogous to items that allowed Iax to assume the position that Aleph held and to retrace His tinkers path back along the broken road into the white realm of mortal, where he chase down the moon to his broken hearts desire. Tinkering along the way. A black piece now wearing a white hat. Without his identity Aleph needs must then have assumed Jax position and forced to remain on the dark side of all things for balance. A white piece wrapped in the cloak of darkness. And thus the enemy entered into Ergen for the very first time, introducing dark things into Temerant , and it was all downhill from that day onwards.

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.’