Our next step is to examine what we know of the world outside today. Chronicler has an appointment with the Earl of Baeden-Bryt at his estates in Treya which is a days ride or about 30 miles away. The Earl is Newarre's local noble and he was granted his title by his king. Aaron is also off to Treya where he is considering 'fighting for his king and his country.' He expects the kings representative there to pay him a whole gold royal for enlisting with the penitent kings army and a royal is a Vintish coin. QED Newarre's king is a Vintish king.
The two army deserters we encounter have just been through this process , they have their vintish gold coins and are now sporting the Vintish kings colours of blue and white. Now these are good enough colouring words for the decking out of common foot soldiers but if you were at the other end of the army, up with the top brass, you would wear a much finer uniform that is technically a different colour. The royal guard of Maer Alveron are decked in his house colours, the heraldic tinctures of sapphire and Ivory, or blue and white to me and you. That's close enough a match in my book to confidently state that Maer Lerand Alveron, aka the King of Vint is Aaron's penitent king in question who is currently financing an army of Newarrians with his own coins to go and fight the rebels for him. He is still among the living and is therefore Not the king that Kvothe king killer killed.*
The other Vintish king is called Roderick but I'm not going to bother wasting ink on someone we have never met who's just become the favourite king to be a corpse by now.
*Of course it is possible that Lerond Alveron could be dead and buried and that his house colours have now passed down the line of succession to his son and heir, except that he didn't have one of those the last we heard...
But he may well have a daughter,
Aka The Princess Ariel!
This fantasy fanfic theory can take many shapes and forms. Some of it is good, some less so but the best of it them are the ones that tie up the most loose ends. The Princess Ariel gets one single mention across all of our books but we can still extrapolate quite a bit from that solitary appearance if we want to. Consider that Kvothe offered the truth of her story to Aaron in the same breath as tales of Felurian and learning sword fighting from the Adem as a tempting lure to entice him to stay in town. Kote must fully expect Aaron to know exactly who he is talking about here and that this is a story he would very much like to hear. That implies that this name is of some importance in the wider world and being a princess automatically makes her father a king and that is quite likely going to be Aaron's penitent king if this secret clue is pertinent in any way to our story. Her mother is therefore Queen Meluan Lackless making Princess Ariel Alveron-Lackless to be the name of their firstborn child.
Amazing what you can screw out of one little mention, but we can take this tinfoil further still when we ask will this princess be heir to the Lackless name or the Alveron name? or both (or neither!)
My best guess towards that conundrum would be that as part of their marriage contract, in order to protect both of these ancient family lineages it was agreed that the sons would be groomed for the king's line and the daughters would go to the queen's. That would be my suggestion to solving a sensitive situation and so Ariel being their only child (so far) is of the distaff lineage. Perhaps a boy next time would have been Alverons hopeful thinking when he heard that he had a daughter but then something happened that threw his life into turmoil. The short version is that since the day she gave birth to the princess this husband and wife have argued and fought and separated. In my story Meluan then moved out of Vint and took her daughter away to her own family estates in the north leaving Lerand alone and heirless knowing that without an heir his legacy means nothing. Getting his own bloodline back on track is the only chance he has at a future but The Lackless family have now claimed the potential heir to the throne of Vint as their own and Lady Meluan's famously passionate temper refuses to even negotiate diplomamatically which probably means the rebels he is fighting against will almost certainly be Lackless rebels who are refusing to accede to the kings commandment. If he loses this fight then the princess Ariel will become a Lackless for good, their family name will continue to prosper whilst the lineage of the king of Vint will end when he does. All that is left now is the waiting...
So yes, Alveron could still be and in probably IS the king Kvothe kingkiller killed after all, he just isn't dead yet.
But how could any of this royal tragedy possibly be the fault of Kvothe the bloodless who left Severen under a cloud just around the same time that we heard some court rumours speculating that the queen might be already with child...
Because the Princess Ariel is a redhead with a bright flaming coppery mop of unruly red hair.
And that's when the fight began.
2 ~ Piracy.
That is a nice hypothetical speculation of my own invention grown into a pretty good plot line that offers us a load of answers from one single mention which just shows how much extrapolation you can do with minimal resources. Some folk will still insist that the princess Ariel must actually be Auri because she acts a bit posh and because they use some similar letters in their names, but these people have no imagination.
If you are one of those people who think that having more data would obviously lead to a more satisfying KKC fanfic then you will probably agree that the largest gap in our narrative in which to insert a follow up story would be a novella to cover Kvothe's journey from Imre to Severen and if we are hoping to explore the 4Corners as much as is possible then a tour of southern Vintas is next on the list.
The Ancestral seat of Vint is Severen but that city was not shown on the original maps we were given when these books first came out. But on the new maps available in the 10AE there is a 'notable city' in Vintas called Sevren, located midway between Renere and Tinuë. However, that location feels a lot like a red herring to me since the capital of Vint needs must be located within the borders of Vint which this random dot on the map clearly isn't. The difference in spelling on this map compared to the approved text is not to be ignored as a typo, such an error seems very wrong on many levels and it's hard to imagine that in such an authorised edition the mapmakers accidentally got the name of a major city wrong which leaves us with the best answer being that Severen and Sevren are two different places. The only tinfoil that I can spin to accommodate turning these two places into one is that it is a translation error and when founded the historical meaning of this cities name was taken from the original Eld Vintic. In that language the difference shown here is between what is essentially two different places, one up on the high ground and one down on the low ground. In such an instance the difference may be indicated not by adding an additional word, but by altering the original spelling in a small way. Thus Severen High is the name given to the upper city of nobility and Sevren Low refers to it's more common quarters. Threpe only speaks of the Maer and his palace and not the lower city whose name is actually used on our maps. You might aslo apply this high/low translation reasoning to the differences extant between the names Myr Tariniel and Mirinitel too, since Denna's song was most likely researched from an Eld Vintic manuscript translation given her movements with her patron, but that's a thought for another day...
If we are going to visit the king of Vints ancestral estates we need a destination and Sevren is a dot on the map to aim for. I still have an issue about this dots geographic accuracy but it is at least on the shore of the broken sea although it really should be found the North shore imho. Kvothes intended route from Imre to Severen High is nicely explained for us in the potted version of his journey that we do receive
'I would head downriver to Tarbean, through the Refting Strait, down the coast toward Junpai, then up the Arrand river.'
The use of up and down is important here for navigation purposes and it clearly implies the Arrand river to be the large river that runs through the Small Kingdoms towards the Eld before branching off Sevren ways. This would be the logical route to follow as it is quickest but does indeed add several hundred miles to a crows flightpath but also shaves the shoreline closely all the way. Denna travelled from Yll to Vintas, via the Small Kingdoms, to Tinuë which implies this to be the usual passage for travelers to take, despite the well publicised dangers of the roads in that part of the world travel by boat may prove the safest bet. The original journey was estimated to take about a dozen days, although in the end it took Kvothe sixteen.
During his adventure there was a storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck although for a very specific reason which is deliberately unmentioned this is Not the correct order, which gives us some license to play around with possibilities. We are also told that Kvothe was robbed, drowned and left penniless on the streets of Junpai, which might put a little ordering to these things.
Moving on to our final destination sees Kvothe limping through the gates of Severen. Now that city as a whole has cardinal gates, we hear of a trip with Denna through the Western gate in Sevren Low and an Iron Gibbet is erected by the East gate in Severen High. The bandit hunters are met two miles North of town although no gate is actually mentioned there is a King's road which would certainly mean a gate. There are also docks which may be either on a river or a sea although the latter would more properly be called a harbour. A process of elimination implies that the water here must therefore be found to the South placing the city on the northern shore and any gate is to be found here it will face towards the Government seat at Renere and therefore imply another Kings highway continuing to the King's own three- part city, although boat travel may well be the norm for that direction.
Severen itself is split in two by the Sheer, a high white cliff which runs from North-East to South west giving a view of the countryside from it's summit. The Eastern gate appears to enter directly into Severen High which would be the carriage path taken by the nobility and and would put the docks to the SouthWest far away on the low ground as it is always down hill to find water. One more important piece of Vintish information we receive is that
'With the exception of Ambrose some miles to the South in his father's barony...'
We hear from Devi that the Jakis family estates are also called the pirate islands which gives us a hard fact. Here be Pirates. The only possible location for Baron Jakis estate then is the land surrounding these islands which are in what our map of the Eternal Aturan Empire describes as the Broken Sea, land which includes the only possible islands for the source of any piracy, this little nugget was also confirmed by Pat during a podcast about...maps.
An unexpected Journey.
Inline.
During Elodin's interesting fact class we hear of a famous river in Southern Vintas which flows the wrong way! it's a saltwater river that runs inland from the Centhe Sea. Now, if we open up all of our available maps and compare them next to each other we can spot one major possibility for this mysterious river which does seem to fit with things we need to know. Despite the presence of various pictures of tinkers and mules and compasses and cartographers info covering that part of the world, a major river can be traced in an unbroken line from the Centhe Sea around the edges of Embrandtani and offers a further direct link into to the Broken Sea and Vintas proper. If the current does indeed flow inland then it should also offer a faster way for sailors to travel deep into the heart of Vintas and so marry up the two loose ends of Kvothe's missing odyssey.
There are four main parts to the Broken Sea, each connected by rivers which would allow uninterrupted passage from Junpai to Renere or onto the docks at Sevren. We may also have the notable landmark of Deepen Falls to get past which just has to be a waterfall, doesn't it? Arriving in Renere may well have been the ships destination for the journey from Junpai but Kvothe limped through the gates of Sevren ragged, peniless, hungry and on foot. However a day ago he had eaten two apples and some salt pork... a food traditionally eaten by sailors on long sea vogages, which fits quite nicely to our assorted boats for tinfoil purposes. He still has his lute, which needs to at some point save his life, and all of his important letters, but his 'clothes' were described as grubby rags which he had stolen. Felas cloak is missing, apparently it was torn up for bandages back in Junpai.
Outline.
Here comes the tinfoil.
Striking up a connection with the nameless dark haired, pinch faced sailor on the way to Tarbean means that Kvothe knows at least one face in the world. At Tarbean he takes a new boat through the Reft towards the Arrant river passage but a storm strikes and the ship is wrecked on the coast of Junpai. All hands are lost yet Kvothe somehow survives with his cloak and lute intact but penniless and in dire need of bandages, bye bye cloak. Count Threpe was keeping tabs on things and he hears about the shipwreck before the month is out. Recognizing Pinch Face again in Junpai docks reveals that PF's ship has docked for supplies and is onward-bound for Renere via Embrandtani and Kvothe seizes the chance to leave and earns a place aboard the crew, possibly by dint of his reciting of poetry for the delight of the ships captain as payment for his voyage, poets are pretty popular around these parts after all. Opting for this new route out of Junpai will re-aquaint us with pinch face which offers us a chance for treachery, which is another tick on our reading list, as treachery would require initial trust and pinch face is the most likely suspect given his strange and otherwise unnecessary double inclusion in our Pat's clues. The piracy part must stem from the pirate islands which are Baron Jakis lands and Ambrose was at home during this time, but he had also returned to the University in time for the start of next term to tell Simmon of Threpe's news. A meeting with any of the Jakis family members is unlikely... but anything is possible, however the pirates themselves are still a threat and the Broken Sea is where to find them. There is also scope for an adventure in the 'Three part City of Renere ' (something Pat mentioned once, he said 'the next book' would probably involve a trip there...a good enough reason methinks for it's inclusion in this book). Leaving Renere by way of the Deepen Falls should not be discounted as a bloody good place to be drowned, and any subsequent resurrection would occur if you went over the edge of the falls, stark naked of course, whilst strapped to a floating lute case for bouyancy, an item which will therefore save your life. A couple of days hard walking in stolen rags and we can then rejoin the official narrative at the southernmost entrance to Sevren Low.
3 ~ The Edge of the Map
‘Maps don’t just have outside edges. They have inside edges. Holes’
As far as Vint is concerned When our crew of bandit hunters are sent into the Eld, they have at least seen a map of the place. Pat is nothing but precise in all things though, and he has again left us with just enough clues to work out the crew’s movements with some confidence, and the results can be used to construct a map of our own which may help to patch a few holes in the text and also fill in some holes in our Temerant history. The numbering is a bit tricky at times but overall, it does come nicely together. For best results use a sheet of A4 squared paper.
The Pennysworth Inn is the beginning and end point of our journey and is going to define two edges of our latest map. This Inn is located at the last major crossroads south of the Eld and this is where our crew first begin their journey proper under the trees. We shall begin all of our Eld-time counting from here and our mileage too, so we should use the crossroads to it’s fullest extent and double it up as a compass rose by placing it right down in the bottom left corner of our landscape paper. Severen is four days walk to the South and there is some talk of a lady Chalker living two days to the west whilst the opposite arm of the CrossRoads will point you towards Tinuë and the East. While North takes you into the trees.
Although the kings road where the bandits operate is also called the north road, all of the indications we have been given show it to be a curving road which actually veers off through the trees towards the east. This is shown to us by Kvothe who draws his dirt map in a curved shape and Marten backs this clue up with his prepared story of being a poacher from the village of Crosson which is ‘a day to the West’. This implies that the north road has changed course somewhat and is actually pointing north-easterly. This is further corroborated by the knowledge that the 20 mile stretch of road that they are here to search has a north side and a south side, therefore it is clearly indicating more of a diagonal slant at this point which is useful as it means our map is using our graph paper to it’s fullest extent. The crew also have Kvothe to thank for the decision to begin on the North side and to head East before a different sort of ‘cross-on the map’ occurs as they head over to the southside and start their search back westwards again. This was a rather unfortunate choice as I estimate that starting on the South side would have yielded a bandit encounter within a day or three, rather than on day twenty-nine.
So starting at the X-roads, the crew begin to head north into the forest until the trees start to get ‘good and thick’ at Crosson. On the first day, from an early start, they cover 15 miles, 14 by good road and one more off into the forest on the north side where they make base camp. If we split the total mileage in two it puts the nearest village at a nice lucky number of Seven road miles away from our first milepost. We can also assume that they bought their supplies at Penny’s so as not to alert Crosson’s local populace too much as they passed on through. So plans are made and we can make a copy of Kvothes dirt map by marking out the next twenty mile posts along our road as it wends its way off to the top right corner of our map and out of our domain. Finally add two lines parallel to the road, one mile to either side, to indicate the path that Marten will actually scout.
The crew actually stay at camp #1 for the next two days as they learn and perfect their new tracking skills in pairs and then on Eld-day IV, Dedan and Hespe walk the seven miles back to Crosson from Base camp whilst camp #2 is constructed further to the east. I place the most sensible place to be near the 4-mile post because that will make it nice and central to the first eight mile long patch of proper bandit searching. It is not until the fifth day in the Eld that Kvothe & Tempi head back to the old camp where they begin the initial two miles of the search. Alternating with D&H will allow them all to work most effectively around a central point and is the best pattern to follow when covering four days of the ground up to the 8-mile marker.
Repeating their five day move and supply cycle will add up to 16 miles of completed search with camp#3 located at the 12 mile post. The next walk to Crosson by D&H will be a very long one, as they will have to return to a point four more miles from where they began, but it should also be the longest journey they have to make if K&T are sensible and only build camp #4 at the 16 mile post. This will allow the search of the north side of the road to be completed in two more days and the following two searches will bring us back to this same 16-mile post, only now over on the South side of the road. The numbers get a little confusing here and it may help to factor in a bonus day of rest for everyone as they swap camp the short hop over to the south side of the road. This hop-step camp moving process will ensure that all of those searching the woods are never more than four miles away from help at any given moment. It should also be noted that it was on the final day searching on the North side where we find the An’s blade growing, so deeply hidden is it in the Eld forest that it is nearly off the edge of the map itself.
The return journey westwards will use camps at the self same mile-posts as before, (16, 12 & 4) and all of this ought to mean that they are actually as good as done with their bandit hunt when Tempi finds their scouts on Eld-day IXXX, about a mile from the original starting point and only 8mile from Crosson, only on the Southern side of the road, not the North. Still, they did get to have a bigger adventure by doing things the long way and also had a chance to hear many stories.
A Cross-on the Map
If your paper looks anything like mine does now then it will likely resemble a graph plotting out some obscure equation. The action now focuses on the bandit’s own permanent camp which is found an unknown distance due South of the first mile post marker making it quite close to Crosson and the Laughing Moon pub which might provide somewhere for the bandits to relax between robberies and also give them a local watchpost of their own where they might gather news of the various travellers passing. The targetting of tax collectors heading north gives weight to the Maer’s statement that the bandit’s ‘might be the local populace,’ Perhaps one of the bandits was even called Tam? I might add that the pub might also grant a place for goat eyed Cinder to buy a drink of an evening, if he so too desired and could somehow disguise his tell-tale sign, something that the Cthaeh mentioned he might well do… The distance of the encampment from the road was guessed at by Dedan who said that he would want at least four miles grace if he were a bandit and so we can draw a new cross-on the map out among the trees somewhere around about there. I might also suggest that one other place mentioned on the bandit’s map is Fenhill, a very descriptive name which might well be a hill near a fen. This could even be the source of a forest stream which may be found to wend its way eastwards through the forest to supply water to, collectively, a pool, a swamp and a fortified encampment.
‘If this is right then we are closer to Crosson than I thought. We could just head Southeast from here and save more than a day’s walking. Does that seem right to you?
No! It does NOT! But using our own nap we can now see these words that were used by the map reading crew now show some better sense as it is quite obvious now that continuing southeast would quite quickly lead them out of the Eld trees at the nearest point emerging somewhere along the east/west road road that forms our lower axis and therefore take them much more directly towards Severen. This would indeed save them a days walking by effectively cutting the corner off and so would be the fastest route back to the Maer and to their reward. However, instead of going by this quicker route, they consider Hespe’s leg and decide instead to trust the map in a different way and to travel back to the crossroads as the crow flies and so hope to soonest reach the Pennysworth Inn again for a well earned bed and the chance to spread the word about the bandit’s demise.
This route involves heading due west through the thinning trees and they expected to strike the road again after ten miles or so. This plan, however, appears flawed in that the cross-on the bandit’s map was clearly not marking the fortified encampment as they assumed, but instead marked a specific location some miles further out beyond the unknown swamp that lies in between. I suggest that it is actually a mark denoting the exact location of Felurian’s pool, or rather her greystone, which will be found standing where it has always stood since her last visit a score of years ago. That this map was also kept in the maers money box with the gold implies is of some importance and yet it is not of any obvious use to the Maer's taxman. If the map was instead the bandit leader's personal property then that means Cinder had learnt the trick to open and close this box for himself and that his Chandrian drawn cross indicates that this paricular Waystone site was deemed as being a rather important part of Chandrian plan.
'whats their plan? Chandrian'
"We interrupt this program for another episode of Tomesπece "
3.141592654 ~ Lunar Ticks
Since we are in this neck of the woods it seems the right time take our first crack at the faen realm, nothing too heavy this early in our quest, the Fae is Elth'e level stuff and none of you are ready for that. Of course, faen time moves at a different scale from mortal time. There are stories of boys crossing and returning mere days later as beardy old men, and also of girls missing for years and then returning as if no time has passed at all. My thoughts on these children’s stories are that they are not Felurian related, she isn’t a paedophile, and they are simply other faen realm encounters that occur when folk ignore good advice to stay away from greystones as they are famously regarded as being portals to and from the faen realm. Even clever Kvothe cannot remember how long he spent there but doubts it was a whole year* and so it is fair to say that if he doesn’t know then nobody understands how dual-moon time works…until now.
Marlock’s Compendium of Faen Phenomena
There are two interesting references we receive from The Eld’s local folk who know best about such local things concerning past Felurian spotting’s. Dedan’s tale was told him by a previous victim’s brother’s son on their first stopover at the Pennysworth Inn and this story is authenticated by the correct recital of her ear-worm song which was accurately remembered by the surviving brother from twenty years ago. That was also apparently the last time she visited the locality as the obnoxious fiddler from the very same inn stated on their second visit that nobody has seen her for ‘a score of years' ...until now. So we have a second statement affirming twenty years having passed since she last crossed over on a manling hunt and, while these are obviously only rough numbers, is still good corroboration and gives us twice as much substance to believe this number to be accurate.
‘How have I never heard of this, it seems it would be hard to miss, Fae dancing on the mortal grass… But has not just this come to pass?
the world is wide and time is long but still you say you heard my song before you saw me singing there, brushing moonlight through my hair.’
Felurian also knows that there are stories told about herself in mortal and better than any she understands how time passes and how even mortals who have eluded her siren song will still remember it's words forever. Kvothe himself recalls four instances of folk returning from her clutches and the tales of their short and sad existence thereafter. Quite possibly these were among the tales listed in the 200 year old Vintish tome A Quainte Compendium of Folke Belief which he discovered in the archives and obviously read the three chapters on Faeries: One of which was entirely devoted to tales of Felurian. Such stories have therefore always been passed down by various bereaved relatives over many generations, and any others who did manage to escape her clutches will all still have her siren song stuck in their heads.
We are also told that there was a full moon that night in mortal when our bandit hunters found her pool and heard her song, but over in the faen realm, at the reciprocal time, it was actually a night with no moon. Of course it was, since the one moon that they share between them was fully in the mortal sky at the same time… that’s how she rolls. And so it is clear that this specific and same whole/empty moon juncture corresponds to when Felurian makes her own mortal crossovers in search of fresh manlings to seduce, as this is the time then the passage between the two worlds is the easiest.
We later see the first sliver of the new moon begin to re-emerge after Kvothe has spent X* uncounted ‘sleeps’ with her under the empty faen sky and working out this X* number will denote how long it takes for the faen moon cycle to achieve what the mortal moon phase does overnight. So, using logic and rhetoric as our tools, we can safely assume that Felurian only ever crosses over to seek the full moon’s light she loves when the faen sky is completely moonless and dark, and dare I say faerful. Expect Felurian Every Twenty (mortal)Years appears to be the rule of thumb and if you had any specific reason to want to seek her out specifically, as Kvothe has promised to do in the future, then this is the correct time and place to go looking for her. Since mortal each year features 5 full moons Felurian will therefor visit once for every 99 moons that she doesn't.
In mortal thinking this X* number could be calculated by knowing the synodic period which we learn occurs approx every 72 days where a mortal year is approx 360 days long and is close enough as to make no odds, a 5-1 ratio. This mortal ratio must then tally somehow with the synodic period of fae which is also going to be influenced by this same 72 number since it is the same moon appearing in both worlds together. Furthermore, each mortal days 1/72 th part of a moon phase will find itself reciprocally balanced in the other sky, as the one sliver diminishes here so a new sliver simultaneously appears over there making both worlds respect the same number. Knowing Felurian’s recent absence as having lasted for 20 mortal years gives us some rather pretty numbers for crunching in order to work out the difference inherent between them. (20 x 360) mortal days = 7200 faen days, which is the total number of ‘sleeps’ between the departure and return of a moonless night in Fae. Dividing this by the mortal synodic number, which must still be relevant by default, gives us a nice round figure of 100 sleeps for each single faen moon phase.
*Kvothe spent approx 300 days with Felurian whilst mortals had 3.
Time
Quite when the Fae actually popped into creation is not known.
But as far as the history of Temerant is concerned we have three distinct ages of man to work with. If we believe that Ergen fell to The machinations of Lanre in a single night then whatever followed must have officially started on the morning after.
[This is an important date we shall henceforth name Lanre Day]
Lanre Day would obviously be regarded as Day One of the following era suggesting everything Four Corners related should have officially started 'from this day forth' to quote Aleph.
Only that's not actually true. The fall of Ergen and the birth of the 4Corners did not follow each other chronologically as you might assume. Instead, sandwiched in between them, was a large central portion of forgotten time which covered the rule of Encanis and his daemonic horde. Numbers are vague but the Cthaeh's statement about Lanre and 5000 years without sleep suggests that centuries then passed before Lord Tehlu came along with his iron hammer to put everything to rights. [This second import date we shall henceforth name Tehlu Day]
We will deal with these ages later in chapters of their own but for now you just need to acknowledge that these Demon Days did indeed exist.
The modern era that we are currently researching that would eventually evolve into 4Corners time actually begun on Tehlu Day, the day that Encanis died on Tehlu's iron wheel just like the church says so in their holy books so it must be true. This was also the day when the number of days in a span was changed from 7 days to 11 with the addition of Felling, Reaving, Cendling and Mourning to commemorate Lord Tehlu and his victory over Encanis.
Ergen - DD - 4Corners (diagram)
Three ages of man.
Quite what the Moon was doing will most certainly wait until later. Suffice to say that on at least one of these two important days she altered her flight path accordingly.
Transmission Over
Here be Dragons
edge of the map part 2
We already had some prior knowledge of Felurian and her pool from Dedan’s story about her which he told us at first basecamp. He states that it was in this exact same stretch of woods where she was last seen by any of the Pennyworth’s locals when some of their own men attempted to take the same short cut home through these self same trees, and with the same resulting encounter. Perhaps Cinder had read my notes concerning the passing of Faen time, or knew it already or just worked it out for himself. Regardless, I reckon he knew very well what the time was and so it is entirely possible that he had a pretty good reason to be found exactly where and when he did because he was fully expecting to be waiting there when Felurian was due to appear on the night of the fast approaching full moon. Perhaps he was hoping for a moonlight tryst… just him and his army of fighing men. Perhaps not. This may have been the real reason why one of the Seven was messing about out in the woods, far beyond the machinations of the court politics of Vintas. Meeting Felurian could even be a vital part of the chandrian masterplan. If this faen conjunction only occurs every twenty mortal years or so then one of the chandrian being present for this exact full moon moment when she chooses to visit mortal again seems far too much of coincidence to me for it not to be relevant.
Alternatively, and knowing the same knowledge, perhaps this Cross on Cinders map is simply highlighting a known faen danger and therefore an area to be avoided, a warning from Lord Haliax that danger lies here and it would not be good for one of his tools to fall under the power of Felurian's immortal song.
But if you don’t like those theories then we must just assume that the bandits simply wanted to rob the Maer’s tax collectors. The box with the map inside had Alveron’s crest upon it meaning that this was the original official case issued by Maer, who also knows how to open it. The taxman was returning to Severen along this road because it is the kings highway and it led most directly back to the kings city. Yet it must also go somewhere else in the other direction too, somewhere under the kings control where taxes are due.
The saying goes that All roads lead to Tinuë but that is clearly an Eastern location easier to reach by skirting the Eld completely. Maybe it leads to the Northern city of Kershaen? A kings highway connecting the King of Vint with the King of Modeg? But then Mogeg wouldn't be paying a Vintish tax now, would they. But a Modegan road would be a very old road as they are long regarded as being the oldest royalty in the world and a straight road to connect them makes a lot of sense. It was is also remarked that
‘It was a long stretch of the kings highway running through a piece of the eld had been old when Vintas was nothing more than a handful of squabbling sea kings.'
But in those days of course this land was far from the sea and therefore this road were to be found on the estates of a different ruler. By zooming out and trying to align our newly drawn page of trees into a map of the larger Eld will show that this northern road heading into the Eld is clearly now veering off in a North-Easterly direction instead, and that just happens to point towards the seat of the oldest house in Vintas, House Lackless.
‘A thousand years ago the Lackless family enjoyed a power at least as great as Alveron’s. Pieces of what are now Vintas, Modeg, and a large portion of what are now the small kingdoms were all Lackless lands at one point’
Any way that you wish to draw those lines onto any of our maps will tell us that The Lackless Lands must have been as big as a country and by default would have always covered much of the ancient Eld, the Southern edge of which today forms a natural border with Northern Vint. [Three crossings?] It's Western boundary I put at the natural line of the Arrand river and the town of Three crossings would be well named to sit at the Y-junction of the two big forest rivers. This was where Kvothe's mother said goodbye to her old family... Felurians greystone and pool are pretty much situated on top of the Pennysworth crossroads which has clearly long been a site of very significant importance ever since two roads first crossed here. This crossroads is even old enough to qualify as the site of Faerinial. The East/West part will be a busy road as it runs in the straightest and most tree-free line between Tinuë and the Circle sea whilst the North/South road would once upon a time have run from the Old Stone Road to the broken sea. Nowerdays The King of Vint is the ruler of a large area of northern Vintas, properly called the Northern farrell, which encompasses everything north of the broken sea and south of the Eld, east of the small kingdoms and west of Tinüe.
The road being robbed is clearly then the road that takes you most directly between Severen and the Lackless ancestral seat which is a northern estate that would appear to be found at the juncture of the Old Stone Road and the mountains. This will place their seat of power just to the north of The Free City of Tinuë, an ancient city which the Lackless family once had historic control over, until the Bloodless rebellion that is...
Putting all of that together in one thought will more than likely make the gold in the Maers lockbox be the taxes being paid to the King by the Lockless family themselves, no wonder Maer was anxious for a solution to his problem this was the stolen money was that paid over by his fiance, and he now had to send his taxmen around again and make her pay twice!
This might be just an unfortunate coincidence that it is their family fortunes were getting hit but bad luck has apparently followed this luckless family around throughout history and that suggests to a suspicious mind that it may not all just be random ill fortune… It might be more targeted than that. Could it be possible that instead of either hunting for Felurian, or specifically avoiding her, Cinder and co. were actually lying in wait specifically to ambush the Lockless Tax returns. Not because they needed the gold but because this deliberate action would cause the ancient family yet another slice of luckless pi? We might even suggest that Cinder was well aware that Meluan herself would soon be travelling to Severen and that she would probably be using this very road herself!
Of course Cinder already has one lot of Lockless ladies blood on his hands and Meluan would make Two. That, to me, reeks of far too much a coincidence for it not to be an important plot point, but there is more. If he and his army weren’t after the woman herself then maybe what they really wanted to get their hands on was her baggage train, or more specifically their orders were to seize The Loeclos Box which we are told never left her side as she journeyed South along this very stretch of forest road. If the chandrian ever suspected that that secret, ancient and mysterious secret heirloom might be leaving the safety of the Lackless estates, possibly for the first time in it’s long and secret history, well that might just be something that would pique the interest of the equally secret, ancient and mysterious Chandrian very much indeed.
4 ~ The Road to Tinüe
Kvothe's next stop was to visit Ademre but we shall now follow this forest road north until it meets with either the old stone road or the mountains, which ever comes first. Spoiler alert: it's both.
The Great Stone Road
This road is the elephant in the room. It dominates the map yet is rarely spoken of.
Straight as a nail, flat as a table and older than God.
It runs from Imre to the Stormwal mountains, never deviating from it’s course. It doesn’t appear to actually go anywhere, the towns it does get close to were built because of it, not the other way around. It’s builders were even mindless of all the trees in the Eld, perhaps it was there before them. Our Earliest mention of it is in Hespe’s tale The Broken Road. Jax follows it to Tinuë, where we are told all roads lead, before travelling onwards into the mountains in search of the moon. At face value this tells us that it predates the creation of Fae, as must Ancient Tinüe. It may well have witnessed the Blak of Drossen Tor, which is coincidentally very nearly an anagram. The Free City of Tinuë today is not actually found on the road itself, however this can be altered to fit by putting the name to the ancient area of land around the roads end as Tinuë proper and the free city being one small part of the whole. This is a lot like saying that the capital of Mexico is Mexico City, but you dont have to be in Mexico City to be in Mexico. Ancient Tinuë also spent some part of it's life as part of the Lackless estates, which were a full earldom at the time until the bloodless rebellion came along which is a very interesting term indeed as that word was also Pat’s original name for the series, Kvothe the Bloodless and later on becomesMaster Namer Elodin’s choice of name for the arrowcatch.
The road runs more or less from Tinüe to Imre, but Imre is a modern city which has grown around the useful roads end purely because of it’s usefulness. The real end of the road is some two miles west of town on university lands just after the road spans the Omethi river as it approaches its final destination. Also of note nearby is a random standing stone which we are told mark Old roads.
The Omethi bridge, called Stonebridge by the locals, is our only glimpse of the road itself. It is described as ‘Ancient, mammoth and part of the landscape with not a soul wondering who built it or why.’ …until I came along that is. We are also informed that it has more stories and legends surrounding it than any other University landmark, such as the term ‘spit for luck’. Wide enough for two wagons to pass and sporting a waist high parapet Stonebridge is part of the Stone Road and crosses the canyon for two hundred feet clearing the river five stories below until, with the last natural obstacle now behind it, it reaches its true terminus at the University itself.
The Aturan Empire expanded around it, they even renamed it the Great Imperial Road for a while but they didn’t build it. If God himself didn't make it then there can be little doubt that its construction was by a highly skilled civilization and it’s very stones have withstood the ravages of time with remarkable ease, the endless trees of the Eld bearing witness to this fact. Only by employing a power at least as great as the Name of Stone would be acceptable for contemplating it’s construction since the bridge still stands and the stone has refused to crack, crumble or collapse even after all this time. It is quite obviously a road built by a race of master builders whom history has long since forgotten, such as the Ergen Empire who’s inhabitants built their wonderous cities over five thousand years before.
The Archives is the centre of the University, it’s oldest part which itself stands upon the ruins of a former university telling us it too was always at the roads terminus and therefore marks a previous connection. The courtyard where Kvothe received his whipping at the pennant pole is called the Quoyan Hayal, or House of Wind and still remains where it always has, outside the Archives only door, above which are carved the words of old in their forgotten language Vorfelan Rhinata Morie. Apart from housing books, the archives is the location of our greatest mystery, that of the four-plate door. Expert craftsmanship has again been employed in its design, seamlessly built from a single piece of stone in a frame, you can run your hand across it’s face and barely feel it’s outline. Neither hinge nor handle mars it’s face, it’s only ornament are the four copper plates with their mysterious holes flush against it’s face and carved with the unknown word VALARITAS. Like the unerring road, it too could have been engineered using the name of stone. It is a door which holds secrets that are not for others to know and whilst it calls strongly to Kvothe,and indeed to Elodin, like no other secret does this is a door for staying shut.
So what might lie at the far end of this enigmatic road? We haven’t seen it yet but we do hear from historians that the lands around Tinuë were once controlled by the Lackless family meaning that they, historically, have always controlled their end of the road. It is another private and secret place and we have the historian Caudicus’ self investigatory rumour that…
‘In the oldest parts of the Lackless lands, in the oldest part of their ancestral estate, there is a secret door. A door without a handle or hinges. There is no way of opening it. It is locked but at the same time lockless.’
I often. wonder if the Lockless door doesn't bear the same inscription as it's counterpart. It should also be noted that the type of key Meluan used to unwrap her Loeclos box is of a shape and design that would also fit the four holes in the four plate door at the University end of the road. This is not concrete evidence, but we don’t believe in coincidence here and so it might as well be carved in stone for all to see that here is a solid link. We have a huge stone road made for unknown purpose, most probably created by using the name of stone. At each end of the road are mysteriously individual yet uncannily identical sounding lockless doors, standing like a pair of bookends which, together, make up the working title for KKC3.
The Doors of Stone.
5 ~ Small Change
A brief history of the world part 3
A Vintish gold noble led us here but that's a lot of money to make change for out in the sticks as the two army deserters discovered and smalltown folk conduct their daily life around smaller coinage. Change is coming tho so it’s about time we started playing about with some lower denominations as well.
Three pennies for wishing
Kvothe deals with a traditional tinker on his way to the Eld and the deal was sealed in the traditional way of doing deals.
‘I’ll give you a an iron penny, a copper penny and a silver penny.’
It was a pittance but that’s what tinkers in stories ask for when they trade some fabulous piece of magic to an unsuspecting widow’s son.
This tradition is as old as the hills and universally recognised wherever tinkers travel. Even Taborlin used this method of payment for his magic amulet, if you believe the tales of Old Cob. Judging from the 10æ notes on currency that we are given, the only place where such a transaction could be covered by pennies of just one country of origin is in the Commonwealth, which seems odd since they are a relatively new addition to the shape of the world. Perhaps the word ‘penny’ is just a general folk translation and we are talking about folk bartering three metal shims here, different pieces of three basic metals, Iron, Copper and Silver given to traditional tinkers in order to strike a deal. That’s an idea for later, but for now we shall just look at how Kvothe paid his traditional tinker more closely.
‘…an iron drab, two Vintish half pennies, and an Aturan hard penny.’
Three currancies are going on here hail from Ceald, Vintas and Atur and Kvothe says he did rather well on the exchange rates for the silver coinage. The copper is therefore the Vintish contribution to the mix, something confirmed by Dedan when he laughs at the though of Taborlin having a copper sword joking that it would be like hitting someone with a big penny. Now, Vintish big pennies come with a deep groove across them so that they can be broken into two halfpenniess which is just as they are designed to be and is actually a very symbolic way of designing something. This coin is meant to be broken and that is it’s fate in life, to become two seperate pieces of the same thing, just as man is born to die, a penny is born to divide and once divided unlikely to ever find their other half again. There is even an old Vintish custon that states that whover cuts the coin offers the choice of pieces to the other. We can't tell from the picture of one in the 10AE so we will just have to assume that it fits the standard design for coinage of having a heads and tails design. The 'heads' side of a coin will naturally depict whoever was the reigning monarch of the day indeed Threpe tells us Maer can mint his own currency which would naturally feature his own portrait. Of course the fate of this heads image will also be to become split down the middle which sounds quite an anarchic thing to me, possibly treasonous defacing a picture of the king. I suppose there might be a penny heads design that features a two faced Lord or Lady, or perhaps one of each, Facing each other across the divide whilst whole but dreading the chisel of doom that will surely come to separate them for ever.
You can purchase assorted kkc coinage from Pat's gift shop and I have seen a couple of cleverly crafted designs that tell their own small stories all about barrow kings and ting, but the coin we see in the 10Æ only shows tails. Te 'tails' image that we see stamped onto this whole penny is quite hard to identify at first but when broken along the groove it is much more obvious that here is actually a picture of a sailing ship, giving us a whole penny design of two ships sailing back to back, one on either side of the line of division. This image is nicely summed up by a line from the play Felwards Falling, which, much like Daeonica, is an old play that not many people know.
‘So, we were ill-lit ships at night…’ I quothed
‘Passing close but all unknown to one another.’ Denna finished.
“Felward’s Falling” I said with something that touched the outwards boundary of respect (*amazed respect* in ademic)
Not many people know that play.
‘I am not many people.’
The truth is out there.
Given pat’s approval of all these images tells us that we can put some trust in them. This coin is a truth, it nods at an old truth about how some things begun their life together as one but that being separated was always going to be their future. Truth has historically been buried by changes in beliefs caused by changes in rulers and borders, usually driven by Atur, whose modus operandi seems to involve relegating truth to become myth and promoting the invading Aturan Empire's church version of events instead. True ancient history has thus been split and seperated from the mysteries of the past, becoming itself a newer history of more secondary change but still in some small places harking back to the earlier days when Vintas was a freshly broken land ripe for settling by the strongest survivers. Indeed there is one line in which (Tar)Vintas was described as ‘little more than a bunch of squabbling sea kings’ which nods nicely at our sailing boats theme, too.
Broken Land
Words and images cannot really be trusted to tell the whole story alone but geography is far harder to hide. The shape of the world is much changed since the time of Ergen, and the recording of anything related to that time has been actively removed by time and by design over all the long ages ever since.
‘Even history books which mentioned them as doubtful rumour have long since crumbled into dust.’
Any first hand knowledge regarding the time before Tehlu Day would have naturally had to be recorded in the languages of the survivors, and the oldest language in the world is apparently Yllish who would have woven their stories into the earliest form of writing, the Yllish story knots. If you could read the secret tales which they told then these would naturally be very old stories indeed, perhaps stories about days best forgotten. Yll and it's knots is where Denna went looking for old stories that may have mentioned the name Lanre. But the Aturans have since done a pretty good job in stomping Yll under their iron boots, I wonder why?
The folk who lived around the Eld at the time spoke Eld Vintic and whilst that language is younger than Yllish it is still pretty old having only been stamped out by Atur some 3-4 hundred years ago.
The third age of man which officially began on Tehlu day ended a nightmare time for all the denizens of this broken land but once God had killed the devil then everyone was free to start their lives over again 'from this day forth.'
Grey area
Vintish money is full of clues if you look carefully. The Cealdish ingots are unadorned and all the Aturan money looks very Tehlin Church inspired to me but Vintish coinage has nods to it’s own past stamped upon it. All money spends though, even in Adem where the mercenaries are hired from. They don’t mint their own currency but earn their pay abroad and send back their earnings in both gold and silver but a Vintish copper half-penny make a very strange appearnace in one of their holiest rites, which probably means it’s a rather important clue. Beneath the sword tree are many important and symbolic pieces of Adem culture including, for a very strange reason, a tarnished Vintish ha'penny.
There really is no good reason for it to be there. The valuable but awkward block of gold is well considered as to it’s inclusion in this sacred ceremony but Kvothe ignored the insignificant little piece of foreign copper coinage, a broken piece too, one deliberate part of the whole, something that has been deliberately broken as is it’s fate. That must surely be symbolic of something important. It is unlikely to be another personal dig at Kvothe in addition to his lute’s presence, the musical clue is more than enough to insult him on it’s own, so what could this small foreign coin mean?
Worthless? Possibly, but not strictly true, it’s worth 6 ½ iron shims which will still buy a man a beer or two in the Waystone Inn.
Smallest denomination? True. in that it has been already broken down into it’s smallest size,hmmm
Tarnished? Yes, and copper tarnishes with a colourful display of verdigris which is implying that age and decay are important to the shape of this clue. It is one part of a Vintish whole and some classical allusion to the 4Corners seems likely, but would that be barbarian history or Ademic mystery? Or perhaps both! It’s all going to be a lot of guess work from here but it’s fun to speculate.
A Broken Land
And (god) said break, and the land broke
I can think of something else in Vintas which is definitely broken, the Broken Sea, and then there is Severen, broken into Upper and Lower, just like our broken penny. In other coinage, Eight bits can be broken from a silver noble, and royalty is divided up much like the whole of fractious Vintish society in general. Renere is called the three part city. The bloodless rebellion cut the free city of Tinuë free from it’s control by the Lackless earldom. The Loeclos family name has been broken into various disparate parts and scattered to the 4corners, All through Vintish society is evidence of breaking things apart, even the broken road led us to Tinuë before the moon broke…everything is broken.
The Adem also have an old and secret tale that reads
‘and since that time the land has broken and the sky has changed.’ we are also told that ‘Seven names have been carried through the crumbling of empire, through the broken land and changing sky.’
That is actually describing a cataclysm of epic proportions and yet the rest of the known world never mentions any such thing. This truth must have been very hard to cover up even in church stories since it would have affected everyone and everywhere but no records nor rumours of it are heard by Kvothe anywhere else in the four corners, no matter how small and obscure.
Something that changed the sky is almost certainly going to be the moon and will probably coincide with her being once always full and round but then changing and doing her waxing/waning thing instead, there might well have been a time when she went missing all together! Since the moon influences the tides and the tides dictate the shoreline then a change in one will affect the other and so qualify as cause for a change in geography so if we are looking for some physical evidence of lunar change then The Broken Sea is the biggest clue on the map, although The Reft might have it’s own deluge story to tell. Perhaps they both broke at the same time.
Don’t ask me exactly what happened on the day the world broke but the smart money is on it being caused by an act of God giving us a most likely date for this cataclysm of Tehlu Day and I think that it was the geography of central Vintas bore the brunt of this change. In Piracy we worked out a tinfoil map of Severen High and Sevren Low. It is a two part city, much like Pat mentions that Renere is also know as the three-part city, but in Severen the break is as obviously marked as the dividing line on a copper penny is. There is a bloody great cliff between the two half-cities stopping them from being one. Perhaps on the other side of the water stands and identical cliff with a similar sounding city, who knows? Something long ago caused the sheer to exist, something earth shattering in it’s action but also very clean cut and likely very quick. This was clearly a very long time ago as only since that time has an entire twin city arisen around this physical sever in the land, whether one side rose or the other side fell is anyone’s guess, but most things fall down easier than fall up so I’m going with that.
Of course the broken sea would be regarded as sea-level in vintish topograhy but there is a good chance that the whole thing is actually a very big lake in a newly filled basin in an area of land that is lower than the Centhe sea-level standard. Water flows down into it via the deepen falls and the strange backwards nature of a certain river to the south of the land. If the weight of water is anything to go by, a sudden rebalancing of the oceans in response to cosmic changes in the gravitational pulling power of the moon physically changing, literally, overnight would suggest a very likely cause and effect for reciprocal action between land and sky. This is all speculation of course but it makes some kind of sense when we are scratching around for elementary ideas.
If the sky changed and the land broke both at the same time then that would imply a connection between them. The night the moon was actually stolen by the enemy will be one possible date of note and that would be Lanre Day in my calendar. But an equally possible date for the destruction would be on the night when she came back again and I have that down as Tehlu day since with the fall of the old came the rise of the new. Either Ergen moving into the Demon Days or the Demon Days moving into 4Corners time are my suspects for being the day the world changed and when the past was to be forgotten ‘from this day forth’ to quote Lord Aleph.
Luckless
Modern Vintas didn’t even exist on that day and the eld-est records of such things were lost when Caluptena burnt, but this doesn’t detract from many surviving records showing that the Lockless family (under various guises) were always the big name in this part of the world and that everyone else came along later. Indeed the Lockless lands once covered much of Vintas and also stretched (at least) all the way to the small kingdoms, Modeg and the Eld, in fact it would be a good line of thinking to suggest that their southern border was once where the land was physically broken asunder by some unknown catastrophe which swept clean the southern land but for some lucky reason spared the northern Lockless ancestral lands. Which rather goes against their detractors calling them the luckless.
Bit of a bummer for all those that Tehlu had just saved who lived down south having lived through the demon days only to see a bloody great tsunami coming down on them. Fortunately for the Northern folk, mountainous Tinuë is a long way from any seawater and is also classically speaking the oldest city in the world. If Lord Tehlu told everyone to gather there safely until the coming ordeal was over then Tinüe would become the place where all safe roads lead. I will bet you a jot he actually sent them to his mother's house. It would be easy to find, just head to the Old Stone Road using the old roads, safe roads… roads to safe places and follow it to it's terminus. Greystones probably have something important to do with navigation.[Arliden ell quote?] Perhaps everyone Tehlu saved as he walked the old world offering his choice of path to everyone also warned them of what was coming and told them to travel to the safety of his mothers house if they wanted to survive the coming flood. After the upheaval, or downheaval, or moonheaval or whatever and when the dust of Tehlu Day had settled on a new age, Tinuë would be the place where everything 4Corners will have started from again and now all the old roads leading towards Tinüe will become new roads leading away from Tinuë instead as the Four Corners was quartered up by hordes of new nomadic pioneers setting out to claim their fortune in this new land of opportunity
So the Gold rush began. Some peoples with certain skills, like Blacksmiths, flexed their black muscles to take advantage of the lands bounty and forged out a new life among the iron hills and took their old stories about ever burning lamps with them. It is quite possible their first leader was Lord Rengan who Tehlu named the forger of the path. Those who would become Modegans sought the quiet corners of the Eld forests for their home whilst Common folk followed the main road to its far end and there founded the Commonwealth where the Reft had turned mountainous Yll into islands. In central Atur a new Order was making plans for world domination, an armed future with the church at the wheel since Tehlu had left the new world in their priests bloody hands and a new world order was beginning to take shape.
The Adem became outcasts who now keep their secrets hidden far away from the world that doesn't want them. They were declared outcast wherever they settled, which also fits in with the theme we are seeing of a definite plan to deliberately bury the past.
Lord Illian of Ergen* and The Edema Ruh roamed the land freely learning and eternally re-telling all the oldest stories, singing olden songs and performing the old plays, subconciously depicting subtle clues and hidden twists in the plot which are some small ways of them giving voice to subtly preserved secret information. Costumes and props are clues to the past and live on eternally on stage. If accurate portrayals of sensitive events from the forgotten past were deemed dangerous to the plans of important people then no wonder the Ruh are on the list of folk who deserve to be silenced ‘for the greater good’. This is exactly what happened to Skarpi.
Vintas got it's Atur visit eventually but that invasion didn't happen overnight and fizzled out with the fall of empire. When the book of the path did arrive they found a civilization of superstitious peasants with ingrained beliefs and a tangle of lords and ladies squabbling over their pedigrees. House Lockless is the eldest of them though House Calanthis won the argument and house Alveron of Vint came second.
Modeg never got invaded at all and so a Modegan story would be an original story. Daeonica is Modegan.??
Over time, things were more and more accepted by society as being just like the old church records told you they were and so it was that the past was quietly buried and some things were simply stories, not history and obviously never really happened as far as the man in the street cared, life’s too short to worry about faerie tales.
So nobody today looks at some of the small things in life and puts two and two together any more to ask questions as to why broken things were customarily designed to be broken in the first place. Whatever is the real tale behind this symbolic practice involves poking about down in the depths of local custom where the clues lie hidden by those who understand the shape of the old worldmust be buried underneath the weight of the new. But on this day of new beginnings and with Lord Tehlu now burned to ash, we have to ask the question ‘whatever happened to his Mum?’
We have many pages of clues regarding the Lackless family and so we should be able to create the biggest storyline so far. However, flicking about between all of their assorted names can only confuse matters unnecessarily so I will put my faith in a line from Caudicus as a truth we can trust and so I will use the root translation of Lockless as the true family name from this page onwards.
All Löeclos is one Lockless
'The family was called Loeclos or Loklos, or Loeloes. They all translate the same. Lockless.'
If the Lockless family name is the eldest of all family names (and trust me it is) that means that their name must have also been the first family name which at the time would make them the only noble family that there was. They ruled the land from the mountains to the sea, until some of the 'squabbling sea kings' we heard about one day rose up to became powerful enough to steal some bits of land off of them. Now modern history, 4Corners history, which is also church approved history, began on Tehlu Day the day after Tehlu and Encanis burnt together on the wheel in Atur and this important date would technically have recorded as year#1 of everything that has happened ever since. This Tehlu angle draws a parallel with how we view our own years as being counted since the time of Jesus.
But with Tehlu having just left this mortal world, who would all the people that he had just saved wish to rule them in the future of his land of the free? Lots of people would say this job actually went to the first king of Modeg and that answer clearly has won a lot of support. Some KKC readers might suggest Lord Selitos would now make a return to power and run for a second term in office, but he had other fish to fry. According to Kvothe in this part of the world the first kings of Tarvintas were the Calanthis family and that might well be true, but I reckon if you change the question to who the first Queen of Vintas was then the only possible answer would have been Lord Tehlu's mother, the Lady Perial who was now the most important Lady in Temerant. Tehlu's path began right outside of her front door meaning that her house must then be regarded as being the first house on Tehlu's side of the path and so would be house #1. Aka House Lockless. Exactly why she adopted the Lockless monicker as her family name is a task that will likely take up the remainder of this whole chapter.
Lady Perial's Hat
Back to the more recent Lockless family members then and I still remember when I was still new at this kkc game and my very first penny dropping moment was when I thought about Kvothe’s mother, who we are specifically told was once a noble woman. That one clue to the past fitted very nicely in many small ways with other passages elsewhere in the text, such as that among her life skills is a glimpse of a noblewoman’s education that includes a flair for classical language alongside a comprehensive knowledge of court etiquette and protocol in high circles. So we have a woman of noble birth who was suduced by cords of chorded song, fell in love, and ran away with an Edema Ruh trouper. By an amazing coincidence, this exact same thing also happened to the previous Lockless heir who we discover was called Netalia, who also ran away with the travelling ravel. Could it be possible that Netalia had simply changed her name to Laurian for the usual reasons and that in all actuality these two people were one and the same person? A bit like how Kote has changed his name from Kvothe only that his name change was for a few unusual reasons, too. Unsolved mystery concerning the re-naming of older names does seem quite normal within the Lockless family tree.
The more I thought about it, the better it sounded and I was convinced I was onto something big… I later found out that I wasn’t actually the first to think up this theory, just the latest in a long line of newcomers to the game who have spotted this easy clue first of all and this was the most common theory that people who were reading the books closely had arrived at so far. It's also the only real theory than everyone agrees on. But we all have to begin somewhere, so this piece takes me right back to a time when I didn’t even have a proper kkc notebook to scribble my mad ideas in. This is a Triangle problem and it goes something like this.
We are trying to establish a three way link between ‘Dark Laurian, Arliden’s wife' and Meluan Lockless, the heir to the Lackless Family name and the classical character ‘Lady Perial’ from the play For All His Waiting
Linking them all together correctly will allow us to arrange them more permanantly in a block of three things to use in conjunction with all the other bricks in our wall, a bit like sygaldy only with triangles. The three points we shall call L M and P. for obvious reasons and firstly, we are trying to justify that L=M until we are firmly convinced that it is true. If this was sympathy class you would be focussing upon your Alar. OK? Then off we go.
Laurian {Lockless} Meluan
Sister Piece
Meluan passionately hates all of the edema ruh for their part in her sisters’s infamy, although what she thinks of her sister herself is not known, Shame? Anger? Respect? The truth is well hidden but the story is well rumoured. Even Caudicus' history books tell of the eldest heir abandoning responsibility which means that if this is a recent publication and is not talking about a previous member of the family from years ago, then the story of Netalia Lockless eloping with a Ruh trouper is pretty widespread news and not just a hushed up family secret. Court gossip and rumour might even put the name Arliden the Bard as the other half of the equation and scandal does seem to happen rather frequently in the family’s long history. Perhaps Meluan wants to believe that her sister was tricked, or lied to, or kidnapped even, or perhaps underneath she really just hates her wayward sister for breaking free from her chains of duty and dumping all of the eldest childs family responsibilies onto her own shoulders instead. After all, in a parallel universe it might well have been Netalia Lockless who would go on to court and marry the Maer. But Kvothe’s mum is called Laurian, even the Cthaeh calls her that, so where did Netalia go to?
The big clue here comes along in the song that Arliden wrote about his wife which got him into her bad books enough for her to throw him out of their wagon to go sleep by the fire instead as a lesson to mind his tongue in future no doubt. It seems likely that she prefers the life of an anonymous trouper on the open road and does not wish to be identified as her former self to any unfriendly ears. She certainly didn’t appreciate the remarked upon appalling meter that Arliden had used in order to force his chosen songwords away from their natural pronunciation pattern.
In the song, Kvothe’s father refer’s to his wife as ‘My sweet Tally’ which is clearly a private and personal nickname between them but which doesn’t fit with the name Laurian by any stretch of the imagination. Yet this nickname is later compounded with the line that he made his wife ‘Not Tally a lot less’ a very forced line which clearly plays on words sounding suspiciously like the names Netalia and Lockless both which was enough to convince me of her trueborn identity.
Many other clues exist, not least when Kvothe causes affront to Laurian when he sings another song about the Lockless family women, one which can be taken in all sorts of lewd ways if you disect it enough, and begins with the line ‘Seven things has Lady Lackless.’
This also shows the infamy of the Lockless family since his songs provenence was ascribed to a girl chanting it in The Commonwealth which is a long, long way from Vint. No wonder she was upset to hear her ex-family name being mocked in rhyme by her own, ignorant son. Or perhaps she knew more about it’s meaning and import than she lets on. If she was born as Netalia Lockless then young Kvothe is obliviously chanting a song which insults his own mother.
There is also the moment when Kvothe meets Meluan for the first time and is absolutely convinced that he has seen her before, although such a meeting was declared nigh impossible. The best answer to that thought would stem from some subliminal family resemblance that suggests she looked like his mum. It might be possible that the once remarked upon visit to ‘relatives at three- rivers’ [ did I put 3 rivers on the map yet?] was actually a meeting of these two sisters and baby Kvothe was also present at the time. That’s about as far as we go as far as the Lockless link is concerned, but it should be more than enough to convince most folk that Yes, L=M is a solid link. It cannot ever be 100% proof, but we only want it to be 33 1/3% to do it’s job today.
Perial (Lady) Lackless
Relativity
Introducing P to the equation is much less obvious. But if we are to have three legs to stand upon…
When we get to the family fall out from the ‘Seven things’ song, young Kvothe, rather conveniently for us, compares the allusions that his songs words made as being no different from those used in the play ‘For All His Waiting’ when Fain asks ‘Lady’ Perial about her hat.
‘I heard about if from so many men I wished to see it for myself and try the fit.’
It’s pretty obvious what he’s really talking about.’
‘The difference is’… explaination given was beautifully, and probably deliberately, interrupted whilst Laurian sent Kvothe to go and get the Tripod!!! HA!!! before she reitterrated that
"The difference is between saying something to a person and about a person."
and Kvothe had unwittingly just done both by insulting her without even knowing it. Her own explanation tells us that as far as Laurian herself in concerned at least one of either Lady Lockless or Lady Perial is actually standing there in the present company. Almost certainly confirming her own title as being that of a Lady. She bangs this nail further on the head by giving another difference (which means that Laurian was officially telling Kvothe three times!) that one is a real person and the other is just a character. But elsewhere in these pages we read about how two supposedly different people can still be the same person when we are related a memory of Laurian telling Kvothe that she knew a man having two separate titles which, by a quirk of fate, meant that he now owed fealty to himself. Bredon confirms that this happens more than you would think, especially among the old families, and you don’t get much older than the Lockless family. That small and otherwise innocuous inclusion in our text could imply that a noblemans title may sometimes be a useful legal ‘hat’ which can be donned as and when required.
I suggest that you could make it up to both Lady Lockless and myself if you found some sweet nettle for the pot tonight.
This last line puts Laurian herself firmly into the cauldron of this tripod shaped equation straight from her own mouth since this answer implies that she herself is currently the injured party that needs making up to.
If Laurian was not herself involved in the argument in any way then she would not personally feel insulted and nor would she have any need to be included in the sweet nettle apology. Yet she has clearly placed herself within this three legged tripod of names as being one of the injured parties.
The question of who is Laurian really is quite like a costume drama where she once used to be the current Lady Lockless and heir to the family name, but now her role is more comparable to the Lady Perial who was one of the Historical Lockless heirs to this same family name. Laurian could genuinely think of herself as either Lady depending on which 'hat' she chooses to wear today.
Trying to correlate the church Perial more closely with the Lady Perial in this play is tricky work but thankfully Pat is nothing but consistent across all of his writing in that none of his characters share the same names meaning that each one is an individual name tag for one person only because Names are important. Perial as two people would be the only exception to this rule and that is a pretty good indicator that as far as Pat is concerned ‘All Perial is One Perial.’
I’ll be the first to admit that the veracity of these latest ‘P’-links are not nearly as strong as that of L=M, yet if it was that obvious a theory then it would likely be equally common knowledge among fans so arguing L=P would be considered as ‘old hat’ by now as well. It would be folly to insist that any such Perial link was impossible as that would enter the territory of faulty logic since you can’t prove non-existence and I am quite happy to put my name to the equation L=M=P. And that should become more obvious in time.
Depending on how much faith you have in each link, that the Perial with the hat was the original founding Lockless, that Larurian was the previous heir to this house’s legacy and that Meluan is the current encumbent of Holy Perial’s historic position will dictate your Lockless triangles strength. It may be perfectly equilateral, or it may be unwieldly and scalene or maybe part-skewed into an isosceles shape by over reliance upon only one part. In order to shore it up into a more solid building block we need to dig a bit deeper and stand a bit further back as we dig even deeper into the Lockless question.
7 ~ Colour Blind
‘…when I finally do find one it’s got five eyes: two greens, a blue, a brown and a chartreuse. Then the next one has only one eye and it changes colour..
Eye colour is important in these books and Arliden’s nonsense is a pretty good place to start. You can work out a lot from eyes which is lucky for us because it’s one of the more obvious building blocks that Pat has repeatedly provided the clues for us to work with and much ink is given over to talking about them. From the Adem’s ‘all eyes are grey eyes’ to Cinder’s being solid black ‘like a goat’ and then there are Faen blue eyes which turn into a solid bright white when the fae come into contact with iron. There is an ancient faen shaper of ‘the dark and changing eye’ and Selitos One-Eye, too. We are told an awful lot about the specific eyes of certain folk from long, long ago and it’s all quite overwhelming to follow, although not a lot is given over to the individual colours of peoples eyes from way back then, that ink is reserved for adding a splash of colour to Kvothe’s own more recent observations. Perhaps the world was a bit more black and white in the old days.
The Eyes Have It
To kick things off, I’ll try working Arlidens problem out backwards for a bit and see if we can spot a pattern to work with. This latest line, to my mind, is best seen as a joke. Kvothe’s dad doesn’t really have these findings in his Lanre note book, It’s just Pat’s clever way of shoehorning the word ‘chartreuse’ into the narrative simply to justify it’s existence. The whole thing seems quite likely to be Pat’s little joke on all of us tinfoilers and our naming struggles in finding words to describe things, like Blue! It’s like playing colours to a blind man sometimes, and I feel that he is probably not talking about the past as much as it is referencing the future, and the future is very complicated stuff indeed, the present day is hard enough at the moment.
Chartreuse is a greenish yellow colour and if you are going to resort to using this obscure word for a particular eye colour shade then it is going to surely represent someone like our modern day hero Kvothe since it is remarked upon that his eyes are green with a ring of gold around the centre, and that is as close to being greeny/yellow as you are ever likely to find when talking about eyeballs. A blue and a brown are much easier to assign and since we already have Kvothe then these will do nicely for representing the eye colour of his closest friends Simmon and Wilem respectively. Our pair of green eyes are more tricky. Elodin and Mola would both qualify on this score, I would like this line of thinking to have also included Fela, or Denna but their eyes are reportedly dark, just like Wilem’s traditional brown Cealdish eyes are. Since we have already got Kvothe down as being the Chartreuse we ought to disqualify his green eyes from also being the same as the missing two greens and to pick a candidate from the other two, however there is much to be said and written about Kvothe’s own colour-changing eyes which, such as during his first whipping, and as Wilem observes are known to darken quite perceptibly when he becomes… angry? As does The Chronicler.
‘Then he saw Kvothe’s [Kote’s] eyes. They had darkened to a green so dark they were nearly black.’
This inherrent brightness control Kvothe has is enough to give our hero/anti hero two different green colour possibilities of his own at the same time, and factoring in the ‘ring of gold’ too means that he is actually best suited in these books to represent all of these three green eyes by himself. His gold rings will dim and his green eyes will darken.
Kote’s eyes, however, appear to have lost their earlier golden ring somewhere along the road to Tinuë. Our favourite inn keepers eyes were also once noted as ‘so pale a green they could almost have passed for grey.' These eyes are now distant and joyless and elder Kvothe is no longer the bright eyed boy he once was, but then again, he is also really one of the Adem at heart now and The Adem, of course, all have the same eye colour… Grey.
Surprising Eyes
Adem grey does vary a bit, a touch lighter or darker from face to face, but that might be something like the Kvothe factor of ‘anger’ or ‘Vaevin’ as grey eyed Penthe calls it, rising behind their usually expressionless faces, but this isn’t 50 Shaeds, and right now, all grey is one grey and don’t even think about mentioning ‘Grey Dalcenti’ yet… just…don’t.
Maedre , to give him his long name, is the only exception to the Adem grey eye rule and when he was initiated into their ranks he was presented to Magwyn for inspection. she read his name and his fate by looking at his hands, his voice, and… his eyes. What she actually and physically saw before her was a chartreuse eyed, flame haired, ex barbarian, musician Adem… I blame the parents.
That only grey eyes exist here is testimony to the purity of the Adem bloodlines and it also dictates that the Ultimate Adem matriarch clearly had grey eyes herself, as per Arlidens assertion on the subject. Say what you like about man mothers, all the men have grey eyes as well which confirms the theory beyond doubt. All the Adem have grey eyes, and the grey of their races eyes is as distinctive as the grey of their special swords. It is a genetic legacy passed down from before the days of the creation war and the long forgotten Ergen Empire. It might be true to say that every Adem ever since the creation war, that Saicere’s 237 previous bearers, that Aethe and Rethe too, were all grey eyed Adem.
It’s a standout feature of the race, like the dark skin of the Cealdim or the red hair of Yll. Subsequently, we should also be able to assume that if you ever saw anyone else with grey eyes then it could be a sign that they might even have a bit of Adem in their own family history somewhere. The Maer has grey eyes you know…
That is how I translate the second of Arliden’s eye quotes. It is Pat’s little joke about the perils of attempting future prediction. Such study will do you no good whatsoever here because this is a History book.
‘A historical basis for Lanre? All the signs point to it, It’s like looking at a dozen grandchildren and seeing ten of them have blue eyes. You know the grandmother had blue eyes, too’
Arliden’s earlier line, though, is where the clues of the past lie, it is natural history you can trust enough to write a song about. The important thing here is that we are told that it is accepted knowledge that mothers generally, (but not always), pass along the genetic eye colour down to their children. Man mothers need not apply.
This earlier and more generalised statement from Arliden is more like his own findings should be, and he is saying that if one can only pin down the pattern then it should really supply the missing link that we are looking for. It the eyes really do have it, then we should be able to see it clearly too, but isolating that link into our own search of ancient timelines is still bloody hard to prove. Arliden was talking about Lanre who was the focus of his whole song and he was clearly not talking about his own son’s snot coloured eyes or his unseen future, he was not claiming to be a Turagior, a word Pat invented because he thought it might come in useful. Arliden was actually doing exactly what we are doing today and coming to the same sort of conclusions, the truth is out there to be found. His analogy is more useful to me right now because it helps point out another nugget of tinfoil I discovered from the very bottom of the Lockless green-gold mine.
A Golden Ring
Kvothe gets his eyes from his mother, he admits as much to Denna, and we hear of Laurian that
‘Her eyes were green with a ring of gold around the pupil’
Which you must admit is pretty definite proof that, regardless of where his red hair may have come from in the genepool mix, Kvothe is definitely Laurian’s trueborn son and is not some weird fairy foundling child, swapped over at birth as the faerie tales spun about him might have you believe. So where did Laurian herself inherit her own quite extraordinary eye appearance from? The answer is clearly that she gets them from her own grandmothers side of the family. Laurian has true Lackless eyes and these specific ‘golden ring’ eye markings are unique in the world that we see at large and probably indicate something rather important.
Do all the Lackless women have them? No. Meluan Lackless is described as being dark-eyed but Arliden’s 10/12 maths don’t rule out their relationship being true and one of them is probably the black sheep of the family whilst the other is following the trueborn family tradition. Perhaps it's a first-born thing. But which one is which? Kvothe’s own eyeball inheritance doubles up his mum’s score to make it 2:1 to the chartreuse as being the answer among what we know of the Lockless family tree, which would mean that if we are correct in our assumptions about eyesight inheritance then we need to ask the question ‘did Perial Lockless have her own ring of gold around her own eyes?’
Now, DM Pat isn’t going to leave a whopping great clue like that lying around for all to see, simply stating that Lady Perial's eyes match Kvothe’s eyes is far too obvious, especially as this is all part an old family secret, and the Lockless family are chock full of hidden secrets. 7 of them at the last count each cleverly hidden by Pat's prose, but as the old crossword clue writers adage goes 'you don't have to say exactly what you mean so long as you mean exactly what you say.'
If we are going to smoothe the crumpled tinfoil of these 7 secret things out gently into a soft acceptance level then I think that we can wager that it would be all rather too convenient for the argument if the words Gold, Ring and Eye were to make an appearance in the same sentence when analysing Perial’s description from the tale Trapis tells, and if these key words are actually there to be found then that will surely be enough proof to unlock the theory of the original and ultimate founding Lady Lockless as also being Tehlu's mum.
What we actually get told is this.
‘When he touched her she felt like she were a great golden bell that had just rung out her first note. She opened her eyes and knew that it had been no normal dream.
Lord Aleph as God going around touching folk is paramount to how they all had their own longnames changed into something they were not. His touch turned the chosen ruach into angels, and whilst these ruach, along with everyone else in the world, must have also felt the touch of his son’s iron hammer, Tehlu's own mother most uniquely, did Not. And that fact is going to prove Very important down the line because it makes her Very different from everyone else. Instead of the mark of iron that he left on the rest of the population Lady Perial was instead touched with gold which would be written in her eyes from that day onwards.
Yes I know that there is a huge difference between a physical ring of gold, an ocular impairment and the ringing sound of a golden bell, but that is how riddles work! Pat's purple prose has hidden the answer words cleverly in plain sight, just like Arlidens clever play on ‘not Tally a lot less’, only this one was a lot better hidden.
The joke is on us though as whilst this last goldfoil nugget should close the case for the accused, obscure symbolism of this kind just makes us think more about the next riddle on the list, which is the line from the Seven things have Lady Lackless riddle that begins ‘One a ring that’s not for wearing.’
8 ~ Unraveling
The secrets of House Lockless are hidden within two riddle rhymes and seven things will likely take many papers to unlock. Some like the door are pretty easy, others like the rings are less so. A few , such as candles, may be impossible to crack without a third book of clues to help us. Still, we can but try.
To differentiate between the two songs more easily it is common practice is to name the first chant the girls song and the second chant the boys song. In the girls song the focus is upon the Lady Perial Lockless herself and it tells us something we didn't know before in that she has acquired a husband since we last saw her. She was unmarried when she gave birth to Menda and so any marriage must have taken place after her firstborn son had left home and probably happened after Tehlu Day. This union would have made her husband the new Lord Lockless by default which really ought to have given him a half share in the running of the Lockless family estates. That means something like the Lockless door that is mentioned in our lyrics (which is obviously going to be the secret door which stands on the oldest part of their ancestral land) would effectively now belong to both of them at the same time. However, things like the 'secret she's been keeping' clearly belong to the lady alone since it is her secret. A candle mentioned in her lyrics is clearly labelled as being his candle but there may well be a second candle under her name as well if we are talking his n hers. Candles will be dealt with in the chandlery when the time is right Seven pairs of items of oddly dual possession like the chancellor's socks cannot be ruled out but that is irrational mathematics more worthy of a Tomesπece. The boys song is more ambiguous about ownership and I like to think this second song is actually more relevant to the husband than to the wife and so I shall upgrade the girls and boys monickers and henceforth refer to song #1 as the Ladies and song#2 as the Lords, and I intend to put a name to him before we get much further down this particular rabbit hole.
Lord of the Rings
Rings are the first piece of the puzzle given to us in the Lockless songs.
"One of them a ring unworn:
One a ring thats not for wearing "
That may appear to mean the same thing but ring lore is an obscure Vintish thing all by itself that has nothing to do with the rings inherent within eyes, apparently.
We hear from Bredon about the tradition of exchanging courtly rings among Vintish society as a time honoured way of displaying your perceived importance. The three levels of ring rank are lowly Iron, Silver for parity and finally superior Gold. Whichever ring you give or receive displays your current rung on the social ladder where kings are at the top and peasants are at the bottom. Gods golden spectacles [NB Jax and tinker,,] mark Lady Perials her as being accorded a status far above any mortal kings in the true way of such things but even if they didn't acknowledge her eyes as having any bearing on ring matters, you must agree that any ring sent to her would always have been superior gold as no name could be held in higher regard than that of the mother of god. Not even her husband can claim that accolade as he was only Gods step-father and although we do not know his own ring status to properly compare their relationship, we can assume that he was likely regarded as a silver person in the three ring scale as you wouldn’t insult such a man with iron. If the eyes do indeed have it then I suppose sporting silver rings in your eyes would be closest matched to having grey eyes. The Maer has grey eyes you know, which hints at some interesting thoughts about his own house ancestors. A silver noble can be struck into eight bits as easily as a copper penny can be split in twain. Quite what colour eye would be a match with Iron is tricky but the non specific 'dark' eyes is the ubiquitous description for the iron loving Cealds so perhaps dark eyes of iron will just have to be used to cover 'everything else' for now...(except blue!)
Now if Perial's gold came via her touch from God, and everyone else in the world received a touch of iron instead then where did these silver people all come from and what's their backstory? The Adem is the obvious answer but they don't believe in Tehlu which is a bit of a spoke in that wheel and I prefer to follow a much deeper answer today.
Silver eyes indicate eyes of Ergen origin and hence are now exclusive to the surviving Ruach.
Now that bit of tinfoil probably deserves a chapter of it's own so let's just put it to one side for now.
Greenwood
Then we are told that there is a fourth ring to consider, an even lower rung of the ladder than iron which once appeared in the ring rankings long ago to mark a servant. We are told that the practice has now fallen out of use completely and is only remembered as a plot device in a number of old plays. A play which shows the origin of ring giving is exactly the sort of place to go dig for answers. Perhaps a good wooden ring colour might be green or perhaps even used to indicate a touch of fae in your bloodline...
In a modern day comparison to our historical investigation, the difference between the top ring and bottom rung of the ladder is well depicted when the Gold tier Lady Meluan Alveron-Lockless gives a member of the Edema Ruh family a wooden ring with her own name freshly burned into if. The class gap between them is emphasized by the Lady giving a ring which shows to the whole world that she is taking the most extreme method of making her point by declaring the recipient to be considered as far beneath herself in every shape, way and form imaginable, that the ravel ruh are ranked in her eyes as the lowest of the low, that the Edema men are an excresence on the arse of world, or even that they are the green discharge that drips from it. Compared to her own lofty golden station they aren’t even bracketed as being the same species as herself*. This gives us the two opposite ends of the social spectrum and it is the view of the Lackless family as a whole who famously disowned their own daughter for daring to side with such a despised family, the One family of the outcast Edema Ruh.
‘That means to her you aren’t even a person. You aren’t worth recognizing as a human being… It’s not the sort of ring you wear,’ Said Bredon uncomfortably, ‘It’s quite the other sort of ring actually.’
Stapes confirms this on the next page when he asserts that ‘You really shouldn’t wear it’ to which Kvothe, who understands her accompanying letter, replies ‘I’m not ashamed of what I am, If this is the ring of an Edema Ruh, I’ll wear it.’ Stapes sighed, ‘It’s more complicated than that.’
*If you count the Fae as being another species then suddenly my thought about a wooden ring being a faen ring suddenly starts to look a bit more promising as an answer.
Of course Faen Felurian asserted that were never any human Amyr either meaning wood might also be their ring of choice, too. The Amyr were of course first formed out of Alephs Ruach, and the Ruach were the survivors of Lanre day, and who may or may not have silver eyes... We really need to go down that choice of the path soon.
/So, let's begin with wood then iron then silver then gold.
Fae/human/Ruach/gods
Green, dark grey gold
All of these words we can associate with our hero and his eyes will hint at four different bloodlines
The four corners of civilization
Husband/
Diagram eye chart pi chart
Unlke our Ladies line of 'a ring unworn' which I'm attributing solely to her since you don't really wear your eyes. A wooden ring fits better onto the Lords hand as being a ‘ring that’s not for wearing' which is verbatim what the learned Bredon and Stapes just said and I think that's going to turn out to be the end difference between the First Lord and the First Lady. Hers is always a golden ring and her own summoning ring for him, which would once have been her silver ring, is now a wooden one instead. Perhaps she caught him diddling the chambermaid.
It is not a summoning ring at all, quite the opposite in fact, this is the ring of an outcast.
Meluan Lockless should know better than any the gravity of using this old family tradition when she let her true feelings about the Edema Ruh be known to Kvothe. It's entirely possible she once sent a wooden ring to Arliden and maybe even one for her sister Natalia, too. Kvothe's new ring he keeps as a memento of his own family reunion and it will end up sitting next to the wooden ring he was given by Auri. His new ring is also really a male heirloom since it this is the ring of the original Lockless outcast then given his mothers bloodline this is his birthright from his eternal grandfathers contribution the family gene pool. Now I bet you a jot that Meluan wasn't even the first Lockless to ever give out a wooden ring and the best way to tie up this ring cycle would be to discover if Lady Perial also once gave the outcast ring to her own mysterious husband. What a scandal that would have been, strife and separation within house Lockless is just the sort of scandal that has dogged their name ever since and if my princess Ariel paper is to be believed then It's happening again right now. I wonder if Maer has gotten his own wooden ring yet?
"It's generally accepted that there was some sort of falling out splintered the family. Each piece took on a separate name"
This sort of husband scandal (sorry) seems prevalent in house Lockless across time but it all had to start somewhere and a good story will always start at the beginning. Lord and Lady Lockless must have had at least one child of their own in order for the family name to have continued on after them , which it obviously did, but their offspring could never be of the pure gold perfection of the mother as the fathers silver contribution would have muddied the well, so to speak. Even if there was nothing but inbreeding in the Lockless house thereafter they would none of them ever be the 24 carat that greatⁿ granny Perial was.
I earlier proposed that to keep both of their noble houses supplied with heirs, the Maer and Meluan should agree to share out their offspring with house Vint raising the boys and house Lockless inheriting the girls and I still have no fairer answer than that. If this has been the standard arrangement down the ages, part of the Lockless plenary powers perhaps, then Lockless is always going to be a purely female house. This will nicely explain why so many family members flew the nest to make their names elsewhere in the world.
" Lack-key, Laclith, Kaepcaen"
These were all the male children given over to their fathers house to raise but not deserving of the Lockless name. In the worlds oldest bloodline all of the boys are considered bastards and only the golden girls get to stay.
So the first Lord Lockless was banished from the Lockless lands and in those days these lands stretched far and wide meaning then he would have been doomed to wander four extreme corners in search of a new family to call his own, one who wouldn't turn him away because of his 'tainted blood'.
Kvothe as a male is a direct descendant of this union . From his mother’s side of the family he already has the Golden rings unworn of the Lockless family's greatⁿ grandmother and on his greatⁿ grandfathers side he has now received his 'ring that's not for wearing.' It is not the original of course but it is a true Lockless male heir's ring, it’s even got their name burned into it so now he has a matching set. OO. So through him the male bloodline is still unbroken and Kvothe the Bloodless is the current favourite candidate to qualify as being a 'son that brings the blood.'
He probably also gets his bright red hair from the male side suggesting this first Lord Lockless was also was also a red head which if you put everything together pretty much wraps up the case for Perial's one time husband to have been called Illian, first Lord of the the Edema Ruh.
Auri say’s that a wooden ring holds your secrets, and Auri is very wise about such things.
Mad Matty Tangle is not and so he sometimes has to just make stuff up and see where it goes hoping that it will all come out in the wash.
A play on words
Of course, we know that in Naming circles a wooden ring means that you know the name of wood and the Lockless box is a prime candidate for also being a shaped article that was once created for purpose by speaking the Name of wood to it. I imagine that wood will be more complex a name than stone to master because it will naturally have a higher level of vaevin than a stone.
Since I don't know what is inside the box any further credible investigation today would be a waste of ink and brain cells. We don't even know what kind of fruity smelling wood it is made of or even if the tree it came from has since gone extinct but if the Ladies song is to be believed then whoever wrote it's riddling words purports to know the answer. It's Lord Lockless' rocks apparently. Her husband then would be the proper man to ask but since his name is unknown and he has long since left the stage we need to turn back the pages of time to the date when the box was last open since whoever wrote the song must have been present at the time to know what nobody else does.
Imagine the scene then. The location of this act takes place on the oldest part of the Family estate where the is the mysterious stone door as a backdrop. It is currently unlocked and standing open, a single stone door in a frame that opens inwards into darkness. The stage lighting is provided by a pair of Lockless' candles. Standing in front of this door the Lord and Lady Lockless are performing the box closing ceremony. This is the very root of the family name and it is most certainly family members only. If there were no other witnesses and it is just him and her that tels us that one of them must have also written our song although the promise of a future child may be visibly present under Lady Perials maternity dress. In her hands she holds her husbands rocks which are likely what got her in the family way in the first place. The Lord, as a wooden ring wearer clearly knows the game of wood and wears this plot device upon his finger. [stone iron amber wood bone] and he is holding a suitable piece of wood that he is ready to shape anew. The name of wood is spoken (edro) and the wood becomes an open box. The Lady places his rocks inside and the Lord speaks another word that tells the box to close which it duly does. Naming and shaping adds a new condition on the box to make it become unbreakable, like all shapen ware is, meaning it can never be opened by force, only the correct unlocking counter word will act as the invisible key. Ceremony over, he gives the box to his lady to look after, a secret to hold tight in keeping. She, not being a name Knower herself cannot open the box herself because she doesn't speak the language of wood which is the only key to unlocking a lockless box.
*Tomes trailer. Now the best box in the world would be one which could be trusted to never open again and this is the best box you can get. But if it is now believed safe from opening then it is no longer dangerous, but nothing can ever be 100% perfect, not in a broken world it can't, and so while this box has a 99% chance of staying shut until the aleu fall nameless from the sky it still has a 1% chance of being opened again one day in the future. Moon numbers. That's how the all things operate. Tldr. You cannot have a light without a shadow because imperfection is part of life.
*That will turn up in a tome somewhere I expect .
Then the rock less lord says goodbye to his lady. The lord kisses the Lady farewell then poignantly kneels before her and sings a farewell message to his unborn child growing within her womb.
Then focussing his alar he takes the flame from one candle and puts it in the other to be his light when all others go out, and marches boldly through the dark doorway closing the door behind him and locking it from the inside. The closing image is of this door of stone bearing the inscription SATIRALAV.
Toilet humour.
9 ~ A Match of Two Half’s
Perial was the original pure soul, the one shining light that deserved saving and through her goodness she convinced God to save the whole world from the darkness of demons. God said that all the rest of the villagers, indeed the entire world, were wicked and that they deserved each other and all that they got… pain and punishment. But they were also forgiven and so they survived to witness the new dawn of the new moonrise on the new land and became the four corners future inhabitants, and Perial the Good must have done so as well. She might have followed him and journeyed to Atur? but no, he left her house to walk his path alone.
After the events of Tehlu Day, Perial the Good was renowned and famous in the world long enough for the new priests that her son created to indoctrinate her name into their holy books at the very least. But was the mother of God also declared as head of the new church? …No! They did not, but they were still subordinate to her ‘A Pontifex Always Ranks Under a Queen!’ after all, and she was to all intents and purposes regarded as the Queen of the world. Lady Perial still remains the single most important person in modern history, touched by god and, more significantly, the only person in the whole world that wasn’t struck by down by his iron hammer or had her original longname renamed into something new. Hers is now the eldest name in the world. Everyone in the world went under Tehlu's trial by iron, everyone except her, which would make Perial quite a bit different from all the others who were saved, they were all Iron to her gold.
Silver grey
I'm going to have to dip a toe into Ergen now to try and explain a point.
Tehlu saying that everyone in the world was wicked is quite the generalisation. If we make a comparison with what we know of the previous important date of Lanre day and use the qualification that wickedness is extant in all those citizens who forgot the lethani on Lanre Day and thus doomed the Empire of Ergen then wickedness can be awarded a value. It must then be argued that only 7/8 of the world were actually guilty of wickedness. In a fair trial the remaining 1/8 who remembered the lethani should be found to be not quite as guilty as the rest of the world and might then be pardoned or at worst given a reduced sentence and accorded a different status. It has always baffled me about why some who felt Tehlu's hammer were 'spoken to a bit longer' and these people would be a useful number to fill this 1/8 anomaly I think so I'm going with that.
And A silver coin splits into 8 bits
Instead of the gold status of Perial or the iron status of the forgiven, those 1/8 who remembered the lethani really ought to be given the silver status, and if we are still talking about eye colour, then silver eyes would translate into grey eyes and were awarded to the denizens of the city that remembered the correct path the first time around.
That's not a bad analogy to imagine things even if it is wrong.
So the Adem silver might consider themselves above the barbarian iron but both would rank beneath perials gold
The Only person who could come close to matching Perial in the saving the world stakes would be the Lord of the city of the city who offered a beacon of hope in the first place by remembering the Lethani and saving the seventh city from the actions of Lanre and his followers. Only through his actions was total global catastrophe averted and this one last beacon of hope gave Perial a place to stand as she bargained with God to give the world a second chance.
Seven cities and one city makes Eight and 7/8ths of the land has fallen to darkness and despair. This last remaining 1/8 would be the lands controlled by the revered Lord of the last remaining city of Ergen who alone out of all the city lords defied and denied Lanre his total victory. Between them both they would constitute the accumulation of all that was good in the land and therefore the most logical of choices for hailing to be as king and queen. A union to unite the land under the protection of the Last Lord of Eregen and the First Lady of Temerant
.
a bit special. In reality, this also makes her the matriarch of the oldest bloodline in creation, one last surviving name from of the time and blood of the Ergen empire. A name that was above reproach, never banished by iron, forgotten by history or even remotely challenged in her claim to first house in the 4Corners…well perhaps she was. In truth though her house is Older than the King of Modeg. Older than the king of Vint. Older than Heldred of the nomad Cealdim… Older than Tehlu! The most important woman in the world The only one whose heart was pure enough to matter to Aleph. Her bloodline ran the son that saved the world and brought the flood, the blood of kings is nothing compared to that of Saint Perial who was one the the matriarch of the most important house in history, the place where fresh hope began once more when everyone began following their new choice of path that started from right outside her front door.
That is where Tehlu drew a line in the dirt of the road which in reality must have been a simile for the creation of the Old Stone Road. How, idk, but that's the answer we are clearly shown. and all the paths in his new world began from here. The free city of Tinue is not too far from their door and so it follows that Tehlu was a Tinusan. in thiswhich puts Perial’s bloodline in some very old company indeed. Of course as far as records can tell, the oldest Family name was then spelt Loeclos (not Loëclos!) and their line was based around the mysteries found on their own doorstep. Their family door we have established as being at one end of the Old Stone Road, found on the oldest parts of their ancestral land, And it doesn’t take a lot of thinking to suggest that both of these doors are in all actuality, one and the same thing.
The Mother of the purest Ergen bloodline in the four corners began her tale in the corner of the world that would became known as Tinuë, the first place to be cleansed of demons a beacon of hope for all of mankind, a place the start afresh, a place where the waystones directed everyone else to gather safely whilst the Wrath of God walked the land and did his ironwork upon the demons. Perial was the founding member of the first house dynasty in the new age of the Four Corners of Civilization, of which much is remembered but even more is forgotten, most of it deliberately, but founding a dynasty would require her to have a husband, and I bet you a jot that her married name was to become the FirstLady Perial Loeclos of Tinusa, aka Lady Lackless of the ‘Seven things has Lady Lackless’ song.
According to that bundle of tangles, Lady Lackless did indeed a husband, in fact that song tells us more about him than it does her! But who could possibly match up to being a worthy king to the Queen of the Free World?
He probably also gets his bright red hair from the male side suggesting this first Lord Lockless was also was also a red head which if you put everything together pretty much wraps up the case for Perial's one time husband to have been called Illian, first Lord of the the Edema Ruh.
Immaculate conception
Lady Perial has a bit of a reputation for having lots of men. Fain says so.
[Go to later piece?]In Trapis story it is mentioned that Perial's neighbours
"Were afraid that she might have lain down with a demon, and that her child was a demon's child. Such things were not unheard of in those dark times."
This would mean that there were officially half demons walking the land, ones with a physical link to it giving it a hybrid with the stronger demonic half seeking control over it's weaker mortal half.
Of the seven who refused to cross, all were eventually struck down but #4 gets markedly different treatment from the other 6.
"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.
I transle this as meaning that he broke it in Half! he separated the bad demon half from the innocent human half just like he was breaking a bad penny.
So what happened to human #4 after that?
His inner demon was ripped out and anyone who were carrying a demon child when Tehlu offered them his path would have a demon growing inside them when he struck
"Many of the men and women had demons hiding inside them that fled
inside you, not babies fault. Not wicked. Tehlu spoke to them a bit longer than the rest. Silver eyes a
re demon eyes?
Illian was Lord of Myr t, Felurian's twin brother. She remembered, he got possessed and forgot, but was freed by Tehlu, only half bad. Only half good.