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 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 His godly opposite twin Aleu must always wear and that's about the bones of it. 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 apparently called Iax and in his own opposite way he also knows the un-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 soup.

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 dividing all the naming possibilities there were into two. By dividing the whole void to his own personal ideal, Aleph had created a duality. In the instant that He became Aleu 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 respective gameboards. One such white 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 officially 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 and crested by Aleph, and the fae realmas we know it 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. In this scenario sleeping Auri was then 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 of the three part longnames in every realm of existence were at one time, before time perhaps, all in the same place, reduced down to short names, thirds of names perhaps that would be their smallest possible pieces as we understand these things and then mixed up all together into the maelstrom of bit names that was the nameless void. But these bits still had dreams of evolution. This collection of everynames just needed some omnipotent being to come along and name them all correctly in triad order to create their truenames, 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. That's about as clear as I can express myself today but if you don't follow yet then just go with whatever suits you best. 

Most religious texts will have the creation of the universe being associated with some version of a ‘in the beginning, 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 a ball of 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, dream and nightmare 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 Jax 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/unfold the faen realm was different, a negative perhaps, 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 Mael darkness did and the other would become his newly ‘shaped’ home of Fae which had for itself a tiny bit of light to define it as different, 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 demonstrably quite wrong about that statement. Perhaps she doesn’t really consider the Mael as being another seperate realm at all and that the Mael and the Fae do indeed share a common sky? Perhaps she just assumed that dark and ancient place simply wasn’t relevant to her Faen creation story, or perhaps the 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 moonlit world of man. And all stories agree that was long before the third faen realm was unfolded.

Further evidence for the existance of extra realms might be gleaned from Pat’s book with the earliest time-frame setting, the notoriously difficult 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 beginnings of the Aleu and of 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 have to travel to somewhere else entirely, and if there was nowhere else that wasn't and so it would follow that there is reason to think that these ancient ‘name knowers’ like the lady could only depart from tower world to a place which was Not Tower world and therefore 'elsewhere', and this passing between realms has then long been an Aleu 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 this report isn’t talking mistakenly about him leaving the mortal and 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 on the map of course! This would also open up the likely suggestion that this 'land of the dead '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 Cthaeh also existed before the fae, and that would tally with Bast’s account of Cthaeh's 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 also 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 third 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 the 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 the Tinkers world was demonstrably different because it famously had stars and a full moon shining in it’s sky every night, whereas the sky above Jax old broken house did Not! which clearly marks his broken home 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 should have been always considered as a moonless night, and if there were no stars either then Mael sky 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 pure black 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 unfolding the Fae Jax must have used the same dividing into piles trick that Aleph once did, and used his hard won Pax 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 moon lighting installed. The Fae will now be connected to, but also seperate from, both the mortal realm that Aleph made and from the outer darkness of Meal where the demons are still said to live.

And breathe...

Travel between mortal and fae is well documented via the greystones path and further travel from the fae to the mael is possible by simply walking away from the faelight and into the shadows. So to correctly 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 mael has always been considered to be a broken road down which nobody ever goes making the available 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.

/ Mael------Fae-----Mortal /

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 either 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 regarded as two 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 with impunity, they chose to create a realm which was neither a part of the outer darkness nor a part of Aleph’s outer 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 shaping powers to build the necessary exclave boundary fences out of their own newly fangled starlight spotlight, 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 on the map where the tinker departed from and Jax  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.

6 ~ 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 ~ The Sithe

This one shouldn’t take long because we know bugger all about them, that’s the theory anyway. Young Kvothe has never heard of them and focuses his search more upon the Amyr. But elder Kote has since learnt that the Sithe are a faction among the Fae. Powerful, with good intentions... but let’s talk to Bast first, he seems to know the most about the the Sithe.

‘You don’t understand them if you use the term ‘good intentions.’ But if any of the Fae can be said to work for the good, it’s them. Their oldest and most important charge is to keep the Cthaeh from contact with anyone. With Anyone.’

But Bast is only 150 years old and doesn’t know everything, this oldest and most important charge was given to them before his time… but by whom? Someone important no doubt but before we get onto that mystery there is one other Bast mention of them too, and a very important one as well. When he is making his holly crown defence against any future skin dancer attack, he also talks once again of the Sithe.

‘I’m running dark on this myself, Reshi. I know the Sithe used to ride out wearing holly crowns when they hunted the skin dancers…’

If you factor in the similarity in their bows we can clearly see the links between the Sithe and the White Riders forming that make them one and the same thing. Kote also knows of an old Faen song about them called the White Riders Hunt.

Rode they horses white as snow. Silver blade and white horn bow,

Wore they fresh and supple boughs, Red and green upon their brows.

Where has he heard this from? you might suspect that Felurian may have taught it to him, it was originally a faen song after all, maybe Illien wrote it, he wrote everything else it seems, it might have been something he picked up as a child listening to faerie stories but young Kvothe originally say’s that he has never heard of the Sithe. We can actually glean that Kvothe must have remembered it (perfectly, of course) from the old Vintish book he found later in the archives, A Quainte Compendium of Folke Belief, in which the author recorded ‘songs about the grey ladies and the white riders’. Now this is very interesting because this book was written two hundred years ago and thus predates Bast but it is by it’s very name a book of mortal folk belief. Since every mortal who ever tumbles into and returns from the Fae (a very small number) is usually mad and mostly dead very soon after and we must assume the songs and stories did not come from them. Yet these songs did come to mortal attention long ago, possibly from as far back as the demon days, when these faen white riders must have visited mortal lands themselves and done so regularly and genially enough for this song to be known here, hinting that there must have been some mortal/fae collusion too but this forgotten folk song of Temerant is definitely an original faen song written about one of their own faen factions favourite pastimes…hunting skin dancers. It is a song about the Sithe and their enemies, and these true enemies are not the actual mortal skin owners themselves but are the faen masters who control the poor mortal puppets in question, and this other fae foe faction were called the Mahael-Uret.

Now there is no reason to assume that the Mahael-Uret mob have anything to do whatsoever with the chandrian, but the fact they do share a common enemy with the Sithe cannot be overlooked. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing.

Small crumbs, yes, but I work with what I’m given. The Sithe once came to mortal to hunt down skin dancers. This actually makes perfect sense as a faen entity is the only ‘demon’ capable of controlling a skin dancer but would need a mortal body to possess in the first place, like one did to the waystone mercenary and who’s language this puppet was forced to speak in which I’m going to christen Eld Faen* which was the language spoken in the time of it’s ancient master and is all it had to work with. Since there aren’t any mortals in fae, the dancers masters must be historically tied to Temerant by default. We have another account of them doing just this in Trapis’ tale where he talks explicitly about a rank among the demons ‘who stole the skins of men and wore them like clothes’. One level below Encanis in the demon list of perceived badness which gives them another vague chandrian link and which would clearly mark these demons in particular as being what we now call skin dancers.

[Did they hunt in the mael?]

Taken all together this makes for a rather interesting triangle since we are told that it was actually Tehlu who ousted these particular demons all by himself, but the pieces of the puzzle fitting now has Tehlu/Menda as doing the same job as the white riders/Sithe did and therefore this will also link this ‘good’ faen faction called the Sithe to the real do-gooder Tehlu from Skarpi#2. The enemy of my enemy…

Tehlu anyways

Confused? I’m not surprised, but that is what is written and that is what we have to work with.

Singers

Putting Menda/Tehlu in the same camp as the Sithe ideology would provide another link to another of the chandrian’s triad of enemies, the Order Amyr. According to Skarpi, the Order were formed at the same meeting that Tehlu and his angels were present and the Amyr’s number one purpose is clearly stated as being to confound Lanre and all who follow him, ie. the chandrian. That is why they exist. ‘nothing will prevent us from attaining the greater good’ said their leader which are very similar to the words that Bast spoke earlier about the Sithe sort of working for ‘the good’. In my opinion. this ‘good’ they speak of really ought to be the same good and is the good decreed by Aleph’s justice to bring an end to the demon days once and for all and to deal with the existential threat of the chandrian which would mean that the Seven’s enemies the Amyr and the Sithe should really both be present in the same room for the same reason at the same time. All the people in the world, be they demons, (fae) or mortals have all made their future intentions known by their own choices and are all now standing side by side on the same side of the path that Menda, as Aleph’s instrument of justice, drew in the dirt outside Lady Perial’s front door. And Aleph is there too to protect them, but on the other side are those who refused to cross.

‘(The chandrian )were the first six people to refuse Tehlu’s choice of the path, and he cursed them to wander the corners—‘

But I shall wait to deal with later…

If this is true tinfoil, then we are going to need a link to make it work and Skarpi doesn’t disappoint, you might not think so but it’s all clearly written there for those with eyes to see. Whilst there is no actual mention of any Sithe in the room, we don’t get to hear hear the whole of the story. Not only is the ending cut short abruptly by the actions of the church justice Erlus, but Kvothe also arrives too late to hear the children request this day’s tale, and at six bells one of them must have asked for this exact story in Skarpi’s talent contest, probably along the lines of ‘ I want to hear what happened to Selitos next’ or some such story. Kvothe was late (damn that kid!) and thus valuable first hand knowledge is now lost to us… damn that kid. Now I don’t think the Sithe to be are still among the remaining Ruach who were too scared to get involved in great matters, but rather they have already played their part and made their Sithe decisions some small time before Kvothe finally arrived, something that is sort of confirmed by this other ancient ruach namer Skarpi who before he makes his own exit gives Kvothe a little half-smile when he managed to catch his eye.

‘but at the same time, deep inside me, something selfish was saying, if you’d come earlier and found out what you needed to know, it wouldn’t be so bad now, would it?‘

a bit of our mind reading name knowing stuff going on here maybe? (Read big brother and then come back later if you don’t understand), it’s shaky, yes, but it is strongly hinted that what we need to know, the tale about what happened next was the story spoken for everyone else to hear, children, barman, Erlus & co. included, all neatly explained by Skarpi in the earlier part of this story, a part Kvothe missed because he was late for class…damn that kid.

Every single word used in these books is far too important to be ignored as mere filler, some moreso than others, and as well as this, (in addition, also) we know from our reading that Pat Doesn’t Waste Ink! which only goes to highlight one small but very important word in Skarpi#2 that is easily overlooked in such a large book but has been bugging at me for years now… the word Too.

…too.

Too, tōō adv. as well. in addition. also.

‘Most of the Ruach hung back from Selitos, too. They were afraid and did not wish to become involved in great matters. But Tehlu stepped forward…

So this means that before the Ruach had a choice to join Selitos, they had Already turned down another option. That is written as clear as day. Some of them who could not just forget Lanre’s destructive actions so easily decided to sign up to the Order Amyr, and some would go on to sign up for the angel program… But ‘most of the Ruach’ refused Selitos too which means that they must have already refused another choice of option at this meeting, possibly even more than one option was available, and they were all attending this meeting to discuss what is best defined as the question ‘What are we going to do about the unkillable problem that is Lanre’? The combined findings of this meeting would be that they were offered at least three choices that they could have signed up for depending on their willingness to get involved in progressive plans. One option was becoming an extension of Lord Aleph’s judicial plan which would involve volunteering to join the Angels. This was an option already offered to and indeed turned down by Selitos as being not good enough who instead decided that it was necessary to form another group with a different tactic of confounding Lanre and all who follow him, and some of the Ruach clearly decided that this was much more their cup of tea. And the most logical extension to our options would thus be for some of them to sign up to do the work of Aleph best in a plan which was missed by Kvothe but would allow them to threaten the chandrian existence in a third Aleph allowed shape and form by joining the faen branch of operations and become a Sithe. The Sithe were charged as being full time guardsman to something equally important in the grand scheme of things who would stop anyone (chandrian included) from gaining access to the entity that is the Cthaeh

8 ~ 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 ~ The Oracle

If Aleph knows the names of all things, Cthaeh knows the shape of all futures.

The Tree of Knowledge

I swear it on my tongue and teeth. I swear it on the doors of stone . I’m telling you three thousand times. There is nothing in my world or yours more dangerous than the Cthaeh. 

So then… The Cthaeh… Interesting name, and it’s not a small name. It tells to us about itself.

‘Do not try to pin me with small names. I am Cthaeh. I am. I see. I know… At times I speak.’

[Is that the three part meaning of its name right there? Put that aside for later when we investigate puppet.]

Whilst we should all agree on that emphatic statement, we do need to ask ourselves the question ‘What exactly does it do?’ Well, it is a seer. It sees the future… all futures apparently, and it can see them all perfectly. Now, Perfectly would imply it is therefore a creature of the shapers, because all things the shapers made were created to be perfect too. The whole of Fae was created to be perfect and every tree, every butterfly, every blade of grass, and every grain of sand was made especially to be there, for ever, doing it’s desired job perfectly. The Cthaeh is a part of the furniture of the fae. It is a power to be feared and it is to be found in the exact centre of the realm.

It spends its existence in the one lone tree to be found in all of the vast forest of fae. The faen play folk have a tradition of portraying this exact lone tree in the background of all of their tragedies because of it's importance in their universe.

But there is a tiny misconception as to it’s having perfect power since knowing isn’t telling and so being confined to it’s tree, it can only speak at the rare times it has the opportunity to do so. It can talk the talk but it cannot walk the walk. It can tell a visitor ‘knowledge best left alone’, but it can only do so when there is one actually standing in front of it. Thanks to it’s reputation, it’s location, and it’s deadly Sithe guards, it doesn’t get that many visitors, but if you did happen to chance upon it yourself and were asking it a question, well then and only then would it be able to function as it desires. It is a prisoner to it’s tree in solitary confinement and only a visitor can help it to carry out it’s evil plan…

Now, the future as a whole contains both the good and the bad outcomes to every decision all mixed up together, and both will exist equally in all future possibilities. So when it comes to choices, in always following the darker path of life, Cthaeh is subsequently always rejecting the opposite lighter path in that same decision. Everything comes down to simple choices in the end, each one a single step towards your goal but short term desires are not always thought through to their utter conclusion. The Cthaeh says that it ‘can see ten feet through you and you are only three feet deep’ [ three names deep?] and whilst that may be true it also has a compulsion placed upon it to always tell the truth. It cannot tell a lie but to counter that, it is also a master strategist and it plays a bigger game than you can a possibly imagine. It plays the long game and is so perfect in what it does that it can read all of, your three part name’s possible twistings and turnings so well that it knows what drives you, it knows your hearts desire, and it knows two paths to help you reach it. Then it is a simple matter of maliciously luring you down it’s preferred breadcrumb trail path to doom to help you achieve your worst possible goal. This path may start off looking quite promising and by following it you will be guaranteed to gain your hearts desire… That’s what you wanted after all, and so that’s what you got. But you should be careful what you wish for. It's the path you choose that defines the worth of your destination.

On the Cthaeh’s path, everything will always go wrong in the end. It will suggest a path that will lead far past your own short sightedness and futher on down the road to infinity. It will use your actions as a tool to further it’s own desire in the long run… and given it's current situation that can only really be that it desires to escape from it's prison, and that is probably not a good thing for the universe as a whole.

Possibly, it could leave a compulsion inside of your head to help force the issue and in doing so it can control your body and turn you into it’s own little puppet, it has past form in doing that apparently. Fortunately for our story Felurian looked into Kvothe’s eyes and read that this was not the case with our hero and he got the all clear.

‘the things the Cthaeh says can leave men broken in their heads. but I would see if it were so. you are still my kvothe, still my sweet poet.’

This is very important if you believe that the Cthaeh has any further part to play in Pat’s books. It doesn’t. Kote is completely dismissive of it as being ‘just another part of his story’ and whilst he might recognise with hindsight that his experience could be seen as a near miss, it meant nothing more to him. He has even gained some new knowledge from his encounter. It was a bit like dealing with an ‘end-level tinkerboss3’ in a computer game and he had gotten past the danger successfully without taking too bad a hit.

If Kvothe had chosen to 'Stick by the Maer' then perhaps the Cthaehs path would have led to a different end, but he didn't, did he? So the Cthaehs influence ended there.

/Is Cthaeh a god?/

Why did the Cthaeh leave him untouched? Well I believe it was because kvothe's current path in life was already leading him nicely towards his hearts desire… which it knows to be Death to Cinder. And since that path is also apparently a very desirable outcome to the Cthaeh itself, why tinker with it further?

On the larger scale of things, other visitors have not fared so well and thus it has gained a reputation that no matter how appealing your answers may have looked at a first glance, it’s own eternal ends will always be met too, it’s very tricky like that.

The two polar parts of any choice present in all questions are always going to be between Yes and No, and that means that we are back to binary choices again here…it’s what everything comes down to in the end. Whilst it is true that yes and no follow different paths to different outcomes, life is a dance of many footsteps and there will always be further consequences to consider with each step and the path of a mans life is short whilst time, like the Cthaeh is infinitely big. Given an infinite amount of time to work with, then there will always be two ways of getting to your desire. Directly or Indirectly.

Strange Fruit

/Silver fruit lets you see the thoughts of things./

To be able to pick the perfect dark path, it must have a dark shapers compulsion about it, a negative binding which would make it infallible in all its negative actions. This is pretty much the opposite of the one that compels it to always tell the truth, much like the one Imposed by toching Tehlu's iron wheel. Cthaeh is described by Bast as ‘purely and perfectly malicious' so the best way to deal with it would probably be to always do the absolute opposite of what it suggests. 

If something has the power to comprehend the world to an infinite degree then we can clearly see that they must have the power to understand the shape of the world itself across all of time itself . Therefore the ancient and immortal Cthaeh must be a thing of infinite power and proportions that can understand all things in all ways at all times to the nth degree : past, present and future. We should therefore rightly acknowledge it as being among the most powerful being that you can get and thus we should rightfully name it an Aleu, one that seems to have recently fallen nameless from the sky.

Half and Half is One

I was tempted to type about Chaos now, but then I thought… No! it is actually very orderly in its approach, it is singularly determined towards Doom, Death and Destruction. That is it’s own broken heart’s desire and what lies at the reason for it's being. It is the Aleu of the Mael aka Iax that is now cast out of Mortal and locked away with a broken name in a single room it's old broken house once more. Now, since it takes up the whole negative half of all things, then logically there must be another supreme force out there somewhere with a leaning towards a more positive future. A counterbalance so to speak, an opposite to everything that the Cthaeh desires. We need a good oracle, a master name knower or perhaps just a more helpful tinker. And that is where Aleph steps back onto the stage.

Cthaehos Theory

Now, Since Cthaeh is such a powerful force in the world that comprehends all of time, it has clearly been present since the dawn of time itself. But it hasn’t always been stuck in a tree in the faen realm…

‘Once, sitting on the walls of Murella, I ate from a silver tree. It shone, and in the dark you could see the mouth and eyes of all who had tasted it!’

‘Was Murella in the Fae?’

‘no. I have said. This was before. There was but one sky. One moon. One world. And in it was Murella. And the fruit. And myself, eating it, with eyes shining in the dark.’

Now, the twin cities of Murella and Murilla are linked somehow, that is what makes them twin cities, a situation that makes them perfect for binary tinfoil theories. There is a bit of tinfoil about the Seven somewhere on here which suggests that they were once the two cities ruled by two women, namely Lady Dalcenti and Lady Alenta. But this fruit in the darkness part might mean another link and suggest that one city was always light whilst the other was always dark. Alternatively it could just suggest that it was night-time, however every night had a full moon in those days which would contaminate that theory a bit. Perhaps you had to leave the tree and go into a darkened room to see the light, but no, we are told Felurian was sitting outside on the city walls. Maybe you just close your eyes to see things? Maybe the darkness is Death… or possibly just ignorance! I don’t know… yet, there is lots of tinfoil still needing a polish around here, but all that just means is that working the answers out to things is difficult… not impossible.

Anyway, the point is that This was in a time before the Fae, and so if the Cthaeh also existed in that time, under the name of Iax, and it’s fair to assume that it must have, then it was itself once a presence in the Ergen Empire and it was only later on, only after the creation of the Faen realm, that it could first have been put into it’s current tree prison. It is a prisoner and it has guards to keep it safe and/or solitary where it could do no (more) harm. This imprisonment could only have been enforced by a being of even greater power than itself, or rather by it’s other half Aleph, who represents the good side of the fruit. But surely in that struggle, both entities would always be equally balanced in power at 50-50. Always!

There is a line between all things, Terminus Est, and in any contest of power between two equals we must always witness a perfect draw. But somehow, the Cthaeh must have lost, and lose it did because history proves this to be the case. Different versions of this conflict are recorded in our various stories about the shape of the world of Temerant. But we must also remember that before cthaeh lost, it must have first won for the balance of power to have begun swinging in the first place.

As a consequence of it’s actions, it’s punishment was decreed to be one of enforced solitary confinement. We can assume that killing such a power was not an option. But banishment to a faen prison was seen as justice for all the crimes it had committed upon the world of man during it’s reign of terror. The aim of this punishment was to ensure that there would be no repeat performance. That’s the theory anyway…

Throughout the history of Temerant, the names of many things have been changed to protect the innocent or punish the guilty. This was the point in time when the past was to be forgotten, and never to be spoken of again. The dawn of a new age.

‘No. all personal things must be put aside, and you must punish or reward only what you yourself witness from this day forth.’

Every clue that has survived points to one unknown but specific point in history. The time of the change is marked by the end of the demon days when the justice of Tehlu gave everyone a choice to make and a new name to wear. Time started again and to mark it we got a new calendar which saw important names given to the last four days of a span. The story of this time is buried in the tale told to us by Trapis, and there are only two possible contenders for the roles of being those involved as the two opponents in this conflict. Encanis and Tehlu. They will themselves be little more than puppets wearing masks, each being controlled by the desires of the most powerful pair of puppeteers in the world. Aleph and Cthaeh. And the Cthaeh lost.

.

10 ~ Butterflies

We cannot wrap up the Fae without talking about the butterflies. If the bioluminescent moths are the magical stuff of the Mael, then their butterfly cousins should be redolent of light magic. What might happen if one of Felurians butterflies made it through the door stones into mortal? How about the same question with one of cthaeh's!

I cannot conceive how or why the butterflies are important, but observation tells us they clearly are. 

Colour is how we divide them and by comparing colours to subjects it appears that there is some method to the madness. Chaos theory. 

I think that there is a link between the Cthaehs butterflies and his next words as there seems to be a ceremony taking place during Kvothes encounter with the sacrificial butterfly being chosen by it's colour to answer questions on a specific subject. Each colour pertains to a different field of inquiry. The red one at the start is Kvothe himself and so by dissecting it, Cthaeh can see ten feet through him which is five feet per wing.

The middle section is a knot of two subjects, the Chandrian and the Amyr. The butterflies involved here are all shared between blue and purple.

The Three green ones at the end coincide with an abrupt change of topic as Cthaeh steers the questions onto Denna.

Other coloured insects are available and we can suspect they represent other rradily available subjects, but they weren't eaten in this specific encounter and Kvothe fled with the line 'I have so much more to tell you' ringing in his ears.

If you can accept that as plausible theory then you have your answer already but there is still the question of separating the blues and purples into the Amyr and the 7, and that's quite a tricky puzzle.

Red offends his aesthetic . A mortal in Fae naturally offends him suggesting the red one represents Kvothe himself.

Blue/Black slightly sweet? Which is something to chew on but this shade of blue colour is not to be confused with the different blue that he labels sapphire. My best guess on the sapphire subject would be Felurian since her name is mentioned at this juncture.

So by now the Cthaeh has 'read up' on three different characters. Kvothe, unknown, and Felurian.

With this information fresh to hand it steers the conversation towards Kvothe picking a subject close to his heart, and knowing what it now knows, confidently predicts that Kvothe will ask it about the Chandrian since that is his number one desire and so breaks two more blues in preparation. But Kvothe doesn't ask about the Chandrian, instead he asks about the Amyr. This response was Not what the omnipotent oracle had just prepared for, Amyr are then a different colour to Chandrian meaning tgat it has made a mistake by eating the wrong butterfly. You might scoff here and say that that cannot be since Cthaeh is infallible, but this clearly not so, if nothing had gone wrong then the Cthaeh would remain in calm control, but instead it displays its anger with 'Kyxxs' a word clearly born of anger and curses. Kvothe has just out- bargained the Cthaeh. 

This implies that tte blue/black butterfly answer for which it has prepared is actually the colour of the 7 , and Cthaeh thinks of them as being slightly sweet.

In order to research questions about the Amyr, it needs to consume some purple butterflies and the rest of this middle phase is supported by a mixture of both colours. When Kvothe asks why the purple (Amyr) butterflies the Cthaeh replied 'pure spite' and that it was envious of their carefree innocence. This must then be a hint regarding its opinion of the subject of the Order Amyr. 

Then comes quite a long passage on Cinder alone, whose butterfly was then likely as not the very first blue/black one that Cthaeh had pre-selected before kvothe tripped him up with the Amyr question. Finally the Cthaeh shifts the conversation onto a new topic and everything else merges into the final three green butterflies of Denna and/or her patron who's future may or may not still be connected to the blue/black taste of Cinder, I'll leave that for you to decide.