Agenda

1 ~ A-Gender

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Welcome back, we have now pretty much mapped out the first Corner , but our storylines are starting to pull apart now, we have our roots in Newarre and our trunk in Vintas but now the Paths before us want to branch in different directions at once, but we can only follow one path at a time and the wise student will follow The path of the Book before them.

That is of the Lethani.

This 2corner will begin with the Adem. They are probably the strangest of all the races of man that we encounter and hold their secrets tightly. Stillness and silence are the heart of Ademre, something no barbarian could understand. Still, we can but try.

Man Mothers

When approaching a puzzle that goes against the grain, it is natural to adopt a guilty until proven innocent stance. But you must always remember that this is Fantasy Fiction, not Fantasy Fact. That's a whole different ball game. Played in the room at the end of the corridor. 

Therefore I have a rule. Since this is Not Planet Earth, nothing from our unique Terran culture should be relied upon as a tool to crack open Temerant. Pat can do what he wants in his world. If you don't believe in God, that's fine, If pat wants sex faeries in his stories, that's fine too, and if the story calls for one race of mankind to be a biologically different species from all the others that is absolutely fine with me. It might even be the silver key we need to unlock a bigger secret...

 However, this is High fantasy , a broad subject which includes Science fiction and the science aspect of Temerant is just one more tool in our hands to be used if needed. So we shall put Gods aside for awhile and focus on the actions of humans and rhinta. There will be a biology lesson at π time from guest speaker Snail. The rest of this anthology of all things Temerant is all of my own creation. And I am Not a robot.  The ink before you might seem a bit harder to grasp sometimes but as your alar reaches for this secondary binding, your eyes will open wider and you should see further and you will begin to juggle my ideas in your own head. I will suggest that if my observations from book one were considered to be Elir level thinking, some of book two might require Relar thinking. 

Good luck, and don't stray from too far from the path!

A-Women

Given that Kvothe has studied plenty of four corners medicine and has lived long enough to think he knows better than they do and since he has also never found any rumour of this strange 'A-Women employ parthenogenetic reproduction' phenomenon occurring anywhere else in the entire archives to make him doubt his barbarian belief, then we can be pretty sure that this Adem secret is just that, a secret . A-women are then a brand new discovery to his knowledge making them exclusive throughout Temerant in their ability to reproduce asexually, (House Lockless excepted)

Since they believe that they can make babies without the need for a man mother, why would an A-women ever bother to give birth to any A-men babies at all? What use are they if they have no part in advancing Adem ? Why don’t they just become a race of self replicating A-women instead? A more complete half race without the need or desire for any male input whatsoever. 

Well we have only just connected their own beliefs to the Aturan church’s miracle of the virgin birth and now you want the biology behind it as well? Two miracles in one day! Tehlu’s tits and teeth.  Have you stopped to consider that perhaps they simply can’t do anything about it? even if they wanted to? It’s called natural selection. The A-Women may, or might not, be able to flower alone but either way, no woman can conciously pre-order the sex of their next baby and then nine (6*) months later simply ‘make it so’ any more than any other creature could. Life simply doesn’t work that way. You put in your penny and you get what you are given in this world and God alone knows the real reasons behind such things.

A-Men

As far as their part in making babies goes, all the A-men in the world are an empty branch on the family tree, pretty to look at but essentially rather useless. A fact which in a lesser society might act like a wedge splitting the whole race into two distinct categories: The A-women, who are necessary and the A-men who are not!

However, because they are a civilized peoples the women do not slaughter male children in the crib but raise them alongside the girls , even though they are considered inferior stock. Both adem sexes have been bought up with some level of understanding of the lethani and so it is that all of A-men are raised to know their allotted place in life and to accept it.

 At one point on their travels to Haert Tempi makes a fist to indicate the whole of Ademre, five fingers in concert of which, in his mind, he represents only the littlest finger. His other three (more superior) fingers he nominates as ‘friend, brother and mother. Sheyehn is the thumb to complete the fist but at no point does he use the word ‘father’ in his description because there is no Ademic concept of fatherhood and he knows that man-mothers simply do not exist. Tempi further reveals that he understands the lowly position of A-men in his society in relation to the more superior  A-women when he reveals to Kvothe that

‘Barbarians have no women to teach them civilization.’

a statement which implies that the civilized A-men do have women teachers and this is the accepted hierarchy arrangement of women on top that leads to full M/F co-operation in a society where nobody shits in the well. Kvothe did note that there were more women and children than he expected and this could indicate an unequel gender distribution to this mainly female society with the occasional manchild being the odd exception among all the young girls. I noted that it was always the young boys we saw being used as goatherds, an essential but undemanding task. When it comes to fighting, A-Women are always superior and everyone knows that. Why? Might have something to do with balance I suppose, or testicles, but it really ought to be something genetic for all A-men to never to be ranked as good as the A-women are despite the exact same opportunities and training they have to be considered their equals, not to mention their greater strength and reach. The closest get to a written answer is that men naturally have more 'anger' inside them than they know what to do with which leads to more rash decisions which are made with less self control. Compared to the A-women the males are not deemed to be anywhere near as important to Ademre society although A-Men do have their uses, not least when it comes to sex where the female’s milking of a fine male anger (Vaevin) is a mutually desirable thing, and sex is a healthy and pleasurable pastime when both halves of the union know that a heart is not a penis and that man mothers simply don't exist in Ademre.  At worst these A-men are on a par with the largely useless and likely diseased barbarian men with all of their own strange sex customs, except that the A-men have all had better teachers.

A-Lar

Kvothe and Penthe cover the whole man mother argument about as far as it can go and digging any further will descend into someone trying to prove a negative, and that's faulty logic. I think the main difference between an A-Women and an A-Man all comes down to control, something that women simply have more of that than men do. And a woman in perfect control can achieve Anything. Kvothe might know that he is right but Penthe believes that she is correct and belief will win that argument every time. Kvothe's own powerful Alar is built upon his ability to believe that any given contradictory possibilities can be exactly as he desires them to be and he holds , at best ,a 99% control over his binding thoughts.  But in this argument simply by not being a woman himself he can never definitely believe his own answer in this final 1% for sure. Thus a tiny seed of doubt naturally exists to be exploited in his argument and 1% belief can make all the difference in a fight. Just ask Tarsus.  If you always hold to the lethani, you can never lose a fight.

Now it could well be that Tempi, who showed sexual interest in a barmaid at the Pennysworth Inn, might well be biologically capable of obliviously putting a baby inside her in the usual Barbarian manner, just because an A-Woman doesn't require his seed doesn't make him automatically sterile. So is it possible that Penthe's first child might be born with Kvothe's distinctive and decidedly non-adem colouring? Well in her mind Penthe believes 100% not, and so I'm inclined to agree with her since she always exhibits perfect control.

 Did Kvothe ever consider that in all of his frolicking he might have gotten Felurian pregnant? No, I very much doubt he did, but would Felurian need a man mother in order to create a Bastard? 

The only way anyone might ever answer this man-mother question to any universally accepted level of satisfaction would be through medical disection to see whether the A-Women are actually built differently insides. 

Fortunately we are given the foremost authority in Temeranti anatomy to investigate in the form of the Duke of Gibea who wrote 24 volumes detailing his findings.

So, question one should be 'Did he ever experiment on the Adem?' and I'm pretty sure the answer is Yes.

During his first admissions, Kvothe gives us a brief history of the collapse of the Aturan Empire and one thing he considered a well known fact was that Atur did indeed  'antagonise the Adem.' and given Tempi's beliefs concerning the touching of dead people I think that would most certainly qualify. At the time the Empire were fighting wars of conquest on three fronts against unnamed peoples but the Adem are singled out specifically here and so it appears to me that this was more of a pogrom than a land grab and that there was something more personal going on between the Empire, or rather their strong right arm that was the Amyr, and the race of Adem than simply seizing posession of their land. Antagonise is a word my dictionary defines as 'To struggle violently against' which is then what we assume went on between them, but it also means 'To counteract the actions of.' and that secondary meaning sounds an awful lot like 'confound the plots of' to me,  a phrase used by the the Lord of the Amyr when speaking about what he wanted to do to Lanre and 'any who follow him'. Which might mean that the Amyr justification for this Adem antagonism then was that it was considered to be all 'for the greater good.'

Our own (Terran) understanding of the science behind human reproduction follows the same Woman + Man = Baby equation (WoMB) that is practiced across the four corners and this method of reproduction is believed wholeheartedly by Kvothe as being the only sort because he has been taught so by the masters at the University medica. He has also studied the works of the Duke of Gibea, who lay down the foundations of modern physic and who rather famously did his own human anatomical research very thoroughly indeed and Simmon says that 20.000 bodies bear witness to this fact. But did he ever experiment on the Adem to investigate their reproduction technique? Well He almost certainly did but there is clearly no record of any unusual Adem exception findings in his surviving journals. 

A-myr

Of course, as a secret member of Selitos’ Amyr, a group of men which Felurian avers never had any human members themselves , Gibea should have already known the real truth that the Adem were in fact, like him and his colleagues, a secret race of rhinta mutants hiding in plain sight among the barbarian multitudes of Temerant and this would be exactly the sort of secret thing that a non human Amyr would be very keen to keep quiet about for the greater good of preserving their own secret genetic background. To preserve his inconvenient truth from any future human students Gibea would certainly not have written it down anywhere since any such rumours would of course soon lead to scenes of angry villagers with pitch forks and flaming torches storming his castle. Secrets have a habit of sneaking out and that may lead to uncomfortable rumours further down the line of there ever being any ‘alternative species’ to mankind living within the 4Corners. This inconvenient truth would, then, needs must be supressed at source to better protect both Gibea and his fellow Amyr mutants own genetic secrets from ever reaching the general population.  I don't imagine the Tehlin church would be too pleased if Tehlu's immaculate conception was known to be  common practice among mutants so if Gibea had discovered that it was true that A-Women were reproductively especial and reported this fact to his Amyr masters then I would think their preferred reaction would probably lean towards an Adem genocide. 

We are told that it was deemed 'for the greater good' if they strangled a pregnant woman and everyone seems to agree that 'they did some pretty terrible things near the end. '

The Empire collapsed over 300 years ago which would finally put an end to its Adem antagonistic behaviour and so that is probably a good enough pin in the ground to suggest for founders day in Haert when they finally stopped wandering and put down roots again. 

This would also be the day when they planted their holy Latantha tree since its being exactly there waiting for them to find it clearly wasn't a coincidence. The surviving Adem carried their swords, and their Atas in their heads but someone must have also carried a special seed necessary for a special tree. Perhaps it was Magwyn.

2 ~ Twins

So children of both sexes were born and grew up to become Adem-re. Which I translate as meaning something like 'All Adem are one Adem .' They branched out and founded other towns which may have different interpretations of the lethani but are a tightly knit race.

One big happy family of self replicating grey eyed mutants. We shall leave them up in their corner of the world now and shall doubtless rejoin their path again later but first we need to ask more about where they originated from and that means searching for their ancestors since the Adem of today are actually a second incarnation of Ergen.

"Once there was a great realm peopled by great people. They were not Ademre. They were what Ademre was before we became ourselves."

Now the Cthaeh mentioned that Lanre hasn't slept in 5000 years which is a pretty good indicator as to the rough date of Lanre Day when Ergen fell to his actions and likely as not that day marked the beginning of the end for these first generation Ademre of which Sheyehn speaks. These Adem ancestors , some of whom fought at the Drossen Tor, must then be considered as the original inhabitants of one the the 7 cities of the realm of Ergen and the theme of these next few pages will be to work out which city that actually was.

A Tale of Twin Cities

Twins is a interesting concept to consider in these books and there is no good reason to assume that they don’t exist in Pat’s work… But if I were to ask you to name any instance of twins occurring, then I bet that you would fail. However, they do exist, which is nice to know as that’s enough proof to validate investigation, although I only found one pair mentioned specifically: the twin sisters who made candles and taught strange dance steps in Haert. Most of you should have come up with another clear use of the word though and point out that Skarpi in his tale of the Ergen empire spoke of the twin-cities of Murilla and Murella. But cities are not siblings and they don’t share the same maternal root. So what exactly makes them twin-cities? well we simply don’t know. 'History books that might have mentioned Ergen as an unlikely myth have long since crumbled into dust' meaning that’s about it as far as we can go on our quest for ancient written knowledge. However, these twin-cities do continue to live in the memories of some few truly ancient folk that we encounter who actually spent some time in them, such as Felurian.

‘Was Murella in the Fae?’

‘No. I have said. This was before. there was but one sky. one moon. one world. and in it was murella. and the fruit. and myself. eating it. eyes shining in the dark.’

She also tells us that murella (no capital, of course) was a walled city, a wall on which she sat and ate of the shaper’s fruit from their silver tree, under the light of the eternal moon which was always round and full every night in those days. MurElla was also one of the last seven great cities that were still holding out against the enemy of Ergen and although Felurian never mentions it, Skarpi states that Murella had a near identical twin-city whose name was Murilla which shares a virtually identical spelling to underline their closeness to each other. We can confidently assume that both cities would have always united together against the common enemy which assaulted their respective city walls, not just in the wake of Lanre and Lyra’s unifying actions, and worked as a team implying that the two of them were not completely cut off from each other…yet. Perhaps their link was geographical and each piece controlled one side of a bridge, like the one that spans the Omethi river? Perhaps they were like Severen high and Sevren low, two distinct halfs with a cliff-edge relationship? We can only speculate on this but any such guesswork, whilst entertaining, is not really that necessary because we already know enough to proceed, both places are somehow regarded like two half-pennies might be but they are also in other ways still connected like a whole penny is. Their names mean that they have always shared a unique bond of some sort that unites them and marks them as perennial allies against the common foe and neither of them had fallen to the enemy at the gate…yet.

Fixed Odds

One thing that we can say for sure is at least one of our twin-cities definitely fell as part of Lanre’s betrayal. Myr T (no relation) also burned that night and six further pyres of smoke marked the fate of the fallen.

‘Selitos looked out over the land below and felt a small spark of hope. Six plumes of smoke rose from the land below. Myr Tariniel was gone and six cities destroyed. But that meant all was not lost. One city still remained.’

Pooling together all our vast knowledge of the great betrayal tells us… not a lot. We start off, luckily enough, with Seven cities to choose from. There was also the One city but we can strike Myr Tariniel off the list as even the Adem concur that the ‘one city’, (however it was named), did fall. We can put a cross through Belen, too as when Skarpi#2 speaks of Fair Geisa he mentions Belen’s fallen city walls, but that’s about as much as we can state as being fact. Mixing our various stories up together, however, provides us with one possible tinfoil connection. Skarpi lists the cities for us in a specific ordering of his own reasoning and in his list these twin-cities are the last two to be named. If we line this up next to Trapis tale, he tells us that the cities fell one per day and it was only the final city which was saved by Tehlu on the seventh day, which would equate in Skarpi’s list as being MurElla. Since the other six would have already fallen, this would also indicate MurIlla as being the final casualty. Tying seperate stories together to prove a point is, I agree, rather thin foil to rely too heavily upon but one more line of thinking might give it some added strength because although Encanis succeeded with his task on the first six days, on the final day Tehlu ‘drew near’ before the demon lord could bring his power to bear and so the seventh city was saved. My reasoning here is that given the Empire being described as vast, many miles should lie between any two given cities for Tehlu to walk each day. Except , that is, for the distance between our twin-cities which must surely count as being ‘near’ to each other and if relative distance was an influencing issue in Tehlu’s journey then our twin-cities would share an obvious closeness and that factor may well have denied Encanis the necessary time that he may have required in order to summon enough power for him to bring down the walls of this second twin. All told it’s definitely starting to look quite promising for Murella.

With Myr T a definite goner, Seven cities will now remain in the game. The fall of Belen has reduced the field further but still only one of the remaining six will get to see the new dawn. This makes our in-play scenario currently look a lot like a game of russian roulette where each city will now share the same 6/1 odds of it being the last man standing. But Team M’s twin connection means that between them they cover two chances and are, for betting purposes, to be viewed as the 3/1 co-favourites for one half of their dual domain to outlast all the others. Just like MurElla’s original winning chances of one in seven, so does it’s new odds of one in three also contain a lucky number, too. Factoring in Skarpi’s counting system means that the smart money is now being placed on MurElla as being the mystery last city of hope.

If it was the worst of times, both MurIlla and MurElla have already fallen to betrayal which makes any further investigations into them seem rather pointless, but that gloomy thought can wait in the wings for now, We can sort that thought out later in our Who’s Who.

If it was the very best of times, though, One of our lucky numbers has come in, meaning that one of our twin-cities still stands… HurraH! but that is as good as it ever gets because the other twin, by default, cannot also survive since there can be Only One! Whichever way things may have fallen out, one thing is for certain. Any historical link that ever existed between the twin-cities has most definitely now been severed because the one remaining city of hope must stand alone.

We can imagine the nameless ruler of this last undefeated place of Ergen standing on their own city walls as they watched the dawn break and, just as Selitos was doing far away on his mountain, they were looking out to see the seven self same plumes of smoke rising. One for Myr T, high in it’s mountain fastness. Five for the other diverse cities that formed Ergen’s other powers, and finally, nearest of all the ruins, and in their eyes by far the worst sight of all to them personally lay their own fallen twin. These smoking ruins represented the other half of what once made them a whole. On the plus side help and safety would have been close by for aid to be given to the refugees more swiftly than could be offered to any other city since first come is first served. Twins have a special relationship that goes far beyond what my ink can describe, but with that link is no more and for the first time since these twin-cities were co-founded, one twin will find itself alone as all that remains of Ergen following the fall of empire.

Myrillian

Putting a name to this rulers other half might just be possible thanks to the Adem’s rhinta story. 

‘Six of them betrayed the cities that trusted them. Six cities fell. One of them remembered the Lethani and did not betray a city. That city did not fall

This clearly puts the chandrian down as being six influential and important people in Ergen whom each great city once thought to be trustworthy, a lot like Selitos says that Lanre was ‘considered beyond reproach’ by himself and his fellow ruling Lords and Ladies. It is not unreasonable to imagine that when the enemy ‘moved like a worm through fruit’ it would have aimed at subverting the topmost eight rulers of the empire who were in a position to betray the Empire and would have fully intended for all eight lords and Ladies to forget the lethani. One of them, however, stayed true to the lethani path.

If the last hope for Ergen was indeed once one of our twin rulers, then in our best of times scenario they would now also know that their original and staunchest ally will now be counted among the chandrian. Alternatively, if this rule were now applied to the worst case scenario this would mean that among the chandrian’s ranks would now be found both of our original pair of twin city rulers, both of them now united in their new service to Lord Haliax. That one rather notable situation of there being two linked Chandrian is not even remotely hinted anywhere as being true, not as unfounded folk rumour or in even the silliest of our children’s songs or stories making it almost certainly not going to be the case in point and so all but confirm the survival of one twin-city. Besides, if the puzzle Part has given us can be solved, then this is the only possible correct answer. The single fallen member of their twin relationship will however be found among those listed in the Adem story and will also have been painted onto the Mauthern pot which gives us an opportunity to line up some names and faces with our seven other cities the better to work out exactly Who’sWho.

3 ~ Who’s Who?

Who are the Chandrian?

‘Nobody knows, though every half wit claims he knows.’

Putting all the names to faces and signs is one of Pat’s trickier puzzle problems and you have probably tried to work them out yourself. If so, you may have come to the conclusion that we don’t have enough information to work with, but actually, we have too much. Ben gives us his list list of Seven signs, namely blue flame, one having eyes like a goat, or no eyes, or black eyes. Plants die, metal rusts, brick crumbles, fires dim, they are also, apparently cold to the touch, and one is yoked to shadow or shadow hamed, or maybe it is all their shadows that all point the wrong way…he doesn’t know.

Arliden doesn’t let on much about his own research but he does give us a big piece of the puzzle when he twice mentions reports of animals going crazy or mad around them.

Our author of Vintish Folke Tales has also gathered a list of seven signs blue flame, wine goes sour, blindness, crops withering, unseasonable storms, miscarriage and the sun going dark in the sky.

The Adem list, which ought to be definitive… isn’t because it doesn’t mention anything about their sexes and the words used for descriptions are…confusing but then this is an ancient story translated into Aturan from an archaic language by Sheyen. Isolating the women among them is an important step. We know there are some because when Kvothe actually sees them himself he tells us that they were ‘several unfamiliar men and women’. He doesn’t tell us the exact split although both of these words are plurals. The Cthaeh sticks his oar in too, when it also tells us that they have a lot of experience in hiding those tell-tale signs, which is therefore going to be true but the images on the Mauthern pot won’t be fooled by that and it will, we can be sure, represent them and their signs accurately in their proper form.

 So we have seven assorted men and women, each with a specific sign, a tree is in the distance representing the Cthaeh’s involvement and to cap it off we have an eighth figure in the shape of an Amyr getting in the way, too. Sorting out just the names and signs isn’t enough we need to be adding a description of them which will give us a chance as the puzzle then becomes merely tricky, but not impossible. Getting all the pieces to triangulate correctly into seven piles of three can best be achieved by using logic and rhetoric.

Logic and Rhetoric

1/2 Wits

There are Eight pictures on the Mauthern pot and the first half of the puzzle is quite easy going. Since we are dealing with the chandrian here, the Amyr can sit this game out and instantly we bring the Eight of them down to a lucky Seven. We can just as easily remove Lord Haliax from the equation, too, so that we can focus on his six chandrian proper. This is quite a simple step to take since he is pretty easy to spot and we know the most about him from our stories.

Sex > Male. Sign > No face and Shadow cloak. Adem story line > Alaxel bears the Shadow’s Hame. I think we can all agree on that part and this firm answer will cut through a lot of un-necessary ink and also eliminate many of the ‘double-up’ possibilities that occur in the words which Pat purposefully chose when he wrote our clues. They exist, lots of them, and are put there to trip you in your quest. They raise questions such as ‘are no face and no eyes and black eyes and blindness all the same thing?’ and, well, I suppose that they could be… but they are not. No face is always Lanre and the one with the funny eyes is called Cinder.

Black-Eyed Peas

We have met Cinder up close and personal and his appearance is hard to miss. His eyes have no whites to them, like those of the un-glamoured fae, but his are famously a solid black like a goat’s, or a crow’s. Kvothe is now suspecting for the first time that all of these painted people may be representations of the seven chandrian themselves and so he asks her for guaranteed confirmation by drawing on his own scant knowledge of the 7’s physical appearance and asks specifically if one of these pot people had white hair and black eyes. As the urn will clearly show, these are his stand out features, and are exactly what Nina would have picked up on herself, his eyes are the most important sign and the water and snow are something to do with his also being described as ‘chill.’ Kvothe having any knowledge of her secret at all makes Nina go wide eyed at the thought but she confirms this mans presence with a nod adding that Cinder’s portrait ‘gave me the all-overs’. This is a true depiction, and it is also accurately captured on the Mauthern pot along with a drift of snow to portray the word ‘chill’ which gives provenance to the urn as a reliable source of information and putting it on a par with the Adem story for accuracy. The appearance of snow has nothing to do with one of the7 being described as ‘pale as snow’, that’s another little pat-fall to avoid. Using the reliable Adem story as our key will reveal his true name. And Kvothe’s own eyes can confirm his sex giving him a finished pattern of Name > Ferule. Sex > Male. Sign > Chill and dark of eye. He might also carry a sword with him, but that detail is not a part of his actual sign.

We have now removed an awful lot of cluttering from our lists of possible signs and avoided a few overlaps which makes what is left a bit more manageable. These three were also the ones which Nina painted in detail on Kvothes picture and so we can assume that the unseen images would be of a similar quality. The five people that remain should each have their own sign just as prominantly displayed to leave no doubt as to that pictures most salient point. These other images are now only to be found in Nina’s memory and we are going to be now working blindfolded, a lot like the young girl from Newarre is when she acts along to the childrens chant that in the game that they play beside the tinker at the Waystone Inn, and so our game becomes harder, too.

Flambe

‘When your hearthfire turns to blue, What to do? What to do? Run outside, Run and hide.’

Our next target is to identify the blue flames as this is the most famous of all the signs reported, indeed it’s line in the kid’s song is the first one that Kvothe comes up with when he is with Denna at the Mauthern farm. The Adem Key is clear and tells us that Cyphus bears the blue flame. Now, Old Cob’s version of Taborlin the Great also tells us of blue flames burning and this has a three way link to Martens version where he speaks of ‘Syphus the sorcerer-king’ which is rather difficult evidence to argue with once you have seen it, and so I won’t. I will simply suggest that the spelling is a Vintish dialect used to describe quainte olde folke legends and it is still a nicely placed Pat shaped clue for the sharp eyed to notice and is also the correct answer. But this is clearly now becoming a progressively harder puzzle to solve, the clues are getting smaller and the steps are becoming trickier to climb. Marten’s story also gives us a sex for Scyphus to tick the last piece of his triangle as King Scyphus is revealed as our third man. Name : Cyphus. Sex : Male. Sign : Blue Flame.

1/4 Wits

‘Think now, what does or story need?what is it lacking?

‘Women, Reshi. There is a real paucity of women.’

So four names to go and given kvothe’s earlier plurals we can say that at least half of these should be women. We have less clues in our pile to work with now and we need to rely heavily upon Nina’s memories of what she only briefly saw just once. She describes those that she didn’t paint and brings them to light in trios.

‘People, mostly people. There was a woman holding a broken sword, and a man next to a dead tree, and another man with a dog biting his leg.

Three specific people depicting their three unique signs and we finally have our first woman in sight but also two more men and which only leaves one space to fill and we really need it to be another female just to make them plural, too. A bit more gentle pressing from Kvothe and she remembers ‘one with no face, just a hood with nothing inside it.’ This image is rather striking, too and confirms that these paintings are definitely what Kvothe suspected but one last image is then remembered and she gives us what we were hoping for with her final blushing recall that ‘there was a woman with some of her clothes off ‘ giving us seven different descriptions of five men and two women.

When she later arrives at the University she is asked again what she recalls of the Urn’s backsides and she tidies up a few things for us with her final triad of clues.

‘There was a woman with no clothes on, and a broken sword , and a fire.’

So we have a list of names and a gallery of pictures, We just need a song to go with them now.

‘They formed a circle with a boy in the middle and started to clap, keeping the beat with a children’s song that had been ages old when their grandparents had chanted it.’

The kids of Newarre play their games whilst the tinker… tinkers. Their communal game has a specific song with specific words that they all know and the song also has a specific beat, much like the Lady Lackless hop-skip song does. The meter of that song keeps up a steady beat of Eight counts to the line which is apparently good for skipping practice. The Chandrian song differs in that it’s syllable count is 7/3/3. with an occasional doubling up of the refrain to make it 7/7/3/3, lucky numbers everywhere Again!. Rhythm is more than just lucky, it is also important as it teaches small children how to count and so every syllable is equally important. Songs also hold their shape better as they spread and so you can be sure that the same words have been remembered perfectly down through untold generations.

We hear six verses in total, three during the Inn-terludes and three more in the story proper when Kvothe and Denna are up at the Mauthern farm. One verse is repeated in both scenes just so that we know this is still the exact same song. I have refrained from brining it up so far because we simply didn’t need it, we already know enough about a man whose eyes are ‘black as crow’ or ‘a man without a face’ from personal experiences without any need for a song, too but these verses further confirm this songs veracity. Our repeated line is the one about flames turning blue and that is another sign that we have already dealt with. It also tallies up with Nina’s second memories of there being ‘a fire’ on the Mauthern pot artwork. By-passing these three leaves us with a pair of verses that give us two new pieces of trustworthy information to add to our mix.

Red Oxide

‘When your bright sword turns to rust’ is a perfect line for tying together Nina’s memories of ‘a broken sword’ and ‘a woman holding a broken sword ‘. There is some justification for possibly thinking of the sign decay here instead but that is ultimately going to be a losing argument and so following it further would be folly. We could also spend a while disecting the ‘in thrall of’ part as well but the fact is that the sword can only really be seen as the sign for Stercus who we are informed is in thrall of ‘iron’ which lets us know the pictured sword is not forged of copper or silver but of the same stuff that the fae dread. The sign is not about the blade itself which is simply symbolic of it’s iron content. That ticks all the necessary boxes for our fourth chandrian and also gives us our first woman. Name > Stercus. Sign > In thrall of Iron. Sex > Female.

The Froth

On madness being a possible sign we have only one voice. Arliden’s who talks of animals going crazy though later he uses the term mad instead. He even paints us a picture to explain his point featuring Black eyes, Blue flame and Mad dog. Rather conveniently for us this scene is repeated in the flesh exactly. Black eyes is there, as must be Blue flame so sitting besides the fire really should be Mad dog. The Man at the fire had a bald head and a grey beard. He chuckles and says

‘looks like we missesd a little rabbit Cinder, be careful, his teeth may be sharp.’

which just reeks of being a signpost to his sign somehow involving animals and teeth, just like the picture on the Mauthern Pot. Most importantly we hear him speak which means that whilst his beard may be grey his Adem name is not Grey Dalcenti.

But going back to the subject of crazy/mad animals being a sign makes me think of rabies. Now rabies is a thing in Temerant, Kvothe worries that the draccus may have it and calls it ‘The Froth’ which sounds like a colloquialism. This makes me suspect that a more antiquated version of this might be ‘The Blight’ purely so that this would tally with the Adem Key and it sounds a lot better than ‘Pale Alenta brings the froth!’ In our world the word rabies comes from the latin for madness. This thinking puts grey beard in sync with dog man and therefore both as being Pale Alenta. This also allows us to remove any thoughs of her being pale as snow. That is still to come. We hear no verse in the song for DogMan, Rabies is not a nice image and also a difficult rhyme, but there really ought to be one so I will offer up my own.

‘When your Dog has Caught the Froth jus Blame it All on Patrick Roth fus.’

Name > Pale Alenta. Sex > Male. Sign > brings the blight (Rabies)

Nude Not Naked

Our puzzle pieces are now down to two and we are left with a boy/girl situation. In the childrens game we also see a boy and a girl at play when they were both currently ‘it’ but there appear to be two kinds of rules to the game. First we have the boy who is trying to escape the circle but is being pushed back inwards by the others as they chant the lines about the blue flames. When the girl takes her turn in the middle she covers her eyes with her hand and then tries to catch the others by the sounds they make as they run away chanting the lines about cinder and his crow eyes. Both Cinder and Cyphus are male but Denna also remembers a verse for us, one which the children don’t perform that speaks of our one remaining woman. Curiously, it’s 7/7/3/3 meter matches that of Lord No Face’s verse with a doubling up of the refrain.

‘See a woman pale as snow, silent come and silent go.

What’s their plan? what’s their plan? Chandrian Chandrian.’

Nina also has two goes at remembering the unpainted sides of the pot and on both occasions the image of a nude/naked woman makes her blush a bit. If you want to argue the differnces between being naked and being nude then I suggest that you go and speak to Elodin. At the end of the day these two lines are both talking about Grey Dalcenti who never speaks and so always comes and goes silently. Like Felurian, she apparently also doesn’t much care for clothes.

Name > Grey Dalcenti. Sex > Female. Sign > Uncertain, but silent and naked are part of it.

DeadWood

The most important reason why pale must equal grey comes from the other image on the Mauthern pot, the man by the dead tree. By a process of elimination we arrive at this being Usnea, a man, who lives in nothing but decay. The wood that rots at the farm was new and the troupe’s wagons were all in good condition as recently as Harrowfell. Decay is another classic sign that might also cover a wide range of assorted chandrian sign rumours, brick crumbles (I wonder if these bricks were mixed with iron?) metal rusts (only iron actually rusts) … these are all forms of decay, yes, but Usnea’s sign is most likely specifically aimed towards wood just as Stercus’ sign is aimed only towards iron. The bottom line though is this is the only chandrian we have left and so must be therefore fill the last space. Name >Usnea, Sex > Male. Sign > Decay (Wood Rot’s)

Tree-Angles

‘I wish that you creatures had the wit to appreciate me’

But Usnea’s image is not the only one that contains a tree. There is one on Nina’s painting, too. Behind Haliax there is an image of another tree that is described as ‘bare’, and bare does not mean dead.

Placing such an image in the background is a plot device used in faen plays to warn the audience that things will not end well. This Faen custom dictates that the artist, and therefore the person who actually created this urn, was influenced by the Faen traditions and most likely was fae themselves suggesting this urn will be a work of grammarie. I believe that this tree is the real reason why the pot is so important in the first place. The oracle is meant to be a secret. The Sithe are nothing Kvothe had heard of before, he had no reason to of, their task is to prevent anyone from gaining access to this secret, which means that they only ever deal with faen trespassers and mortals are not even supposed to know of it’s existence. Kvothe found nothing in his library search to warn him exactly what he was facing except for possibly one obscure reference to an oracle. Stories of a winning a leaf from a magical singing wishing tree over the stormwal in the Tahl might offer a hint but really only deflect any idle curiosity about this most secret of secrets… although all stories Do have a grain of truth in them. Our Vintish historian may have mentioned this tree oracle rumour in his book, Three chapters on faeries he wrote, one of them all about Felurian. We also have songs about white riders and that means the Sithe, and songs of grey ladies could possibly be about Grey Dalcenti, yes, but there is no explicit mention of any talking trees. Nobody in far talks about it, ever! It would be like someone spitting poison in your ear. So Kvothe’s picture of the Mauthern pot is probably the only image of it in existance, and some important folk would want to keep such things a secret. The only thing left to add is that this urn could just possibly be a funeral urn and so contain someones ashes but that's just an idle thought so I shall wind this piece up instead with a rundown of our completed and definitive list.

Haliax-Alaxel > Shadow hamed > Male

Cinder-Ferule > Chill and dark of eye > Male

Cyphus > Blue flames > Male

Stercus > In thrall of iron > Female

Pale Alenta > Brings the blight > Male

Grey Dalcenti > Never speaks > Female

Usnea > Lives in nothing but Decay > Male

π ~ Flora Temeranti

4 ~ Angels

Murillish Knots

The tale of Skarpi#2 concerns Lord Aleph and the survivors of the fall of Ergen who are now collectively called the Ruach.

With Seven cities falling, we might assume (for the sake of fiction) that these Ruach were similarly divided by their city of origin. It should also be noted that the city which was saved will make up the clear majority of Ruach since that city lost no-one to the fighting and was quite probably hosting this great event as it was the only safe place left to them after Lanre Day. 

Aleph had a masterplan and it called for Ruach volunteers. We know from the Adem that each of the individual chandrian betrayed one city each. Now If there was a city of Cealdish ancestry, that city would naturally be betrayed by one of their own, likewise for a city of red heads, or for a city of the grey eyed etc etc. making the Chandrian a truly cosmopolitan septet. So if each of the7 had their own unique citylink to cover the 7 races of Ergen then it might very well be the case that in order for Aleph’s Angel plan to work properly in opposition to them then having a genetic blood line to each of the old cities might be deemed a requirement to becoming an angel rather than an affectation. Taking that thought further might also suggest that the Amyr could follow this one Ciridae per fallen city maths, too, but we are dealing with the angels today. 

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Clue#1 ~ Ordal’s Ordeals

The Ruach were all survivors of the fall of Ergen. Those Ruach who chose to follow Selitos all remembered the burning of Myr T and those who chose to follow Tehlu appear to have had similar experiences.

Skarpi gives us a few brief lines about each of these ruach who stepped forwards to become angels in much the same way as the Adem recorded each sword bearer in Caesura’s atas. Of course on the Adem list the owners had all died in nasty ways making it read more like a very long winded obituary whilst all of those Ruach that we hear about were, against all odds, still alive for Skarpi to tell us of their life changing tales.  Eight of them are featured in Skarpi’s angelic pen portraits and, Tehlu excepted, he paints a picture of them all as stubborn survivors and refugees from assorted backgrounds who had just emerged from a great ordeal of death and destruction as all of their cities fell. All except for Ordal that is.

‘Ordal, the youngest of them all who had never seen a thing die, stood bravely before Aleph, her golden hair bright with ribbon.

This is not a description of someone who has just lived through an exodus from a fallen city, this is a tale of youth and innocence showing bravery above her years. The fact that we are specifically told that she had never seen a thing die can only mean that Ordal could not have born witness to any of the recent destruction that has just visited the rest of Ergen. This means, as closely as Pat will admit, that the city from which Ordal hailed must then have been the one city which did Not fall and therefore had no deaths for her to witness in the first place.

Clue#2 ~ Andan other thing

With this first clue as our starting point means that sorting out which of the remaining angels might be paired with which city now becomes pretty immaterial since by default they were all among those which fell, however the last name on the list provides a hidden clue

‘…And beside her came Andan whose face was a mask with burning eyes whose name meant anger.’

Andan certainly seems to have seen his fair share of woes but that is not the key observation to make here. It isn’t obvious unless you are looking for it but Pat writes it down in black and white for all to see and then ignore. ‘Beside’ her means exactly that and nothing else, Ordal and Andan both stood together before Aleph, side by side. Now according to Skarpi’s list, Tehlu , being the son of God, was the greatest of them all and so it is to be expected that he came forward, first and foremost as the leader and orchestrator and after that his followers… followed, in one to eight format, just like Skarpi tells us. But despite being the last name on the list Andan was not spoken of, as might be expected as being ‘the last to come forwards…’ or ‘finally came…’ or perhaps even ‘the Eight among them was…’ but instead he was quite deliberately placed in a position which elevates him up from that ultimate 8th position to a universally recognized joint 7th place instead. Meaning that nobody came plum last, not in this game.

That Skarpi even mentions the words ‘beside her’ at all suggests to everyone reading between the lines that Pat wanted us to imagine them stepping forwards together before Aleph as one, equal before his eyes, and in doing so he is deliberately showing us that there was no order of prescedence in placing either one of them above the other, regardless of age or sex. In the eyes of the world they are marked as equal for a specific reason, as if he was telling us that they are always meant to be though of as a pair. Pat, like Trip, has just thrown us a pair of lucky 7’s.

‘Praise Tehlu and all his angels’ is a line from Ambrose which implies that as far as the 4Corners is concerned, other angels are indeed accepted as available, but it must be noted that these two particular angels are the only names from Skarpi’s list which ever crop up in our books again. Denna, when under the influence of denner resin, cries 'Sweet angel Ordal above' in her delirium. The Aturan church doesn’t hold at all with some part of Skarpi’s heretical tale of the holy angels being the last survivors from some other empire which preceded their’s, and yet as far as names go, this pair of self-same angels are definitely acknowledged since they appear written in their own version of the beginnings of all things religous. These two names in particular are shown to us as being written down in the ‘The Book of the Path’, a page of which Nina stole to draw the image of the Mauthern pot upon. She took great care never to erase Tehlu’s name, or that of any of the other angels, and the convenient proof of this is that Pat draws our attention to the fact that the names Andan and Ordal are found written next to each other, one on each of the Amyr’s shoulders which tells us about their physical proximity to each on the written page meaning that even in the eyes of the Aturan Church their names are expected to be found together, although it is also worth noting that in this instance, the boy’s name comes before the girl’s!

Vintish Marten, who clearly knows this holy Aturan book quite well also prefer’s to go with Skarpi's lead and names Ordal before Andan when he was praying for divine intervention to guide his arrow at the bandits camp. We hear him praying to every holy name that he knows and out of all the angels to choose from, Pat uses this opportunity to hammer home the point that these two names, the most famous and popular pair of angels in all of Temerant, should always be kept together.

The unknown yet deliberate relationship which Pat is emphasizing here might suggest many ways to connect them, husband and wife might be an answer although given Ordal’s young age the idea of them being a married couple is highly unlikely. A more plausible line of thinking is that they might well have been siblings, where a younger sister and her elder brother are being shown to still have a bond to share together whatever happens. But that thought would surely mean that they came from the same city when clearly they did not. Therefore the only plausible answer is that these two would-be angels  are the representatives of the twin cities of Murilla and Murella and that they exhibit this special link between them. They might even be twins themselves.

If we take another at the Adem and then factor in Skarpi’s lines about Ordal and Andan we will have an opportunity to identify their racial origins. 

'There were fifty sandy heads in the room, a few darker, a few lighter or grey with age…'

This is Kvothe telling us how all Adem are blondes and so Skarpi’s description of the angel Ordal's  golden hair colour tells us that whilst Ordal most certainly wasn’t a Ceald she did at least have the correct colouring for her to pass the basic profile test for her being a young Adem girl since she has a similar appearance to Celean. We aren’t told the colour of Ordal's eyes but my Jot says that they were going to be Adem grey.

‘And beside her came Andan whose face was a mask with burning eyes, who’s name meant anger.’

Every part of Andan’s Pat portrait also has an Adem element to it. His face being described as a mask is another classic Adem trait which can be compared to Pat’s general description of all Adem. His name meaning anger also tallies up nicely since all Adem names mean something deep and meaningful and part of Tempi’s name is said to mean Angry which is a pretty good match to Anger being a word describing all Adem boys middle names. Whilst that is only the least of these coincidences it is true that and so we can put on the table to support the theory of Andan the Adem.

Obviously Andan didn’t really wear a mask, that is just descriptive of a deadpan expression. He was in fact acting just like the modern Adem do to keep their feelings from their faces and modern Adem keep their faces as blank as if they were wearing a mask. Andan didn’t really have actual burning eyes either but they were the only part of the man beneath that this facial mask allowed him to show. Nor did he have eyes actually made of fire (yet) he is just extremely angry at the world but with enough restraint not to let it show upon his face. This is another tick in the box to show that in my opinion Andan’s eyes were also grey, just like Carceret’s really are.

‘ Then I saw her eyes. I’d thought she’d been angry before, but it was nothing compared to now…Those angers were like pale candles compared to the forge fires burning in Carceret’s eyes.’

Every tiny clue we have been given  implied that whilst each race of Ergen supplied one volunteer to Alephs plan the Ademic ancestors sent a pair of them and my conclusion is that their boy represented the stock of fallen Murilla whilst their girl hailed from Murella, the city which survived. It seems extremely likely to me then that sex was the real difference between the two half-cities. One was the city where all the A-Men lived and the other was the city of the A-Women and between them was the wall upon which Felurian once sat eating the silver fruit that made your eyes glow.

If this theory is correct that will mean that whichever of the Chandrian betrayed Murilla should also have grey eyes and sandy hair and will most definitely be an Adem male because it was the female of their species who remembered the lethani and thus saved Ergen. And that's why the women are better than the men.  

That scrubs both Stercus and Grey Dalcenti out of the running for the Murilla Chandrian as that field is reduced to four. Ferule, Cyphus, Pale Alenta and Usnea. My money is on Usnea, if for no other reason than his name appears in the same 6th position in the Adem rollcall as Murilla was in Skarpi's list of cities..

5 ~ Dictum

Tangles Dictum

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

Now Ben is university educated, and that is where he has learned a bit of ancient Temic, a language that predates ‘the old Tema that only priests know’ by a thousand years. But Dian is not Drian just as Chaen is not Chan. Inconsistancies indicate errors and given that Pat has stated that he poured an awful lot of time and thought into creating names for this language. I would expect Pats homework to be error free. My only workable  suggestion is that Dian is used for boys, Rian is used for girls and so DRian correctly applies to a mixed group. That loose thread will be important later and since Names are Important I suggest we accept that thought as true and move on.

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

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

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

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

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

Seven words

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

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

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

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

Chaen is counted a lucky number from ancient times which remembers the seventh wondrous city of the old world, of which everything else, including it’s name, is now long forgotten. Every story we have tells us that the name given to the seventh day is based around the word for lucky Seven to celebrate the day on which the seventh city was spared from destruction. The Tehlin Church then arrived on the scene and promptly turned a week into a span by turning 7 into 11 and gave its own names to the four new days. Now these are proper words with deep religious undertones. Felling replaced 8-day. Reaving replaced 9-day. 10-day was changed to Cendling and the last day of the span, the old 11-day, was completely hijacked and turned into Mourning, which has become a general day of abstinence and religious reflection and is the new focal point of the entire span which only helps draw common folks attention away from the real significance of the number seven buried away in the middle. But the practice of counting the first seven days in the old way would have been deeply engrained in the very fabric of Temerant life since the dawn of time and if the seventh day translates as simply 7 then if makes sense that the days one to six might also  refer to the old numbering system, too. The church was not instantly all-powerful and calendar change was slow in the coming to the far reaches of the four corners and it was many years before the iron law and the book of the path finally forced the world to change it’s calender to fit with their holy ideals. Even Trapis corrects himself when he remembers ‘No, wait, there wasn’t any Mourning yet’ and so it seems that instead of the rather sweeping change of completely renaming everything, they simply incorporated the old traditions in so much as they even used the old weekly numbering system into their own spans and furthermore introduced the ‘seven days of high mourning’ where they meddled with the countings of such things to their own satisfaction.

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

Rosetta Stone

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

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

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

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

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

Sticky Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakdown

1-Lu. 2-Shu. 3-The. 4-Fe. 5-Ord. 6-Hep. 7-Cha.

Since I have arrived at this conclusion by using the lucky numbers 3 & 7, if we want to check my connections we should be able to use them not to build up, but to break down these things in a test of destruction.

In my answers, I have arrived at Lu = 1 and in our collective stories about ancient things we can see ‘Lu’ everywhere as it occurs not only in Teh-Lu, but also in Lu-dis and even in Fe-Lu-rian giving us more reasons to believe in my numbers. Mixing numbers into actual names has thus opened up many new areas for further interpretation, but for now let’s just see what happens when we try to reach for the luckiest of numbers, 21 which is best represented by solving the sum Three multiplied by Seven. Or using this new key, ‘The’ times ‘Cha’. Now multiplication is complicated, but it is clear to me that the most obvious answer might well turn out to be a very interesting anagram of the letters that form it’s numbered parts, suggesting that ‘lucky 3’ times ‘lucky 7’ might just equal unlucky ‘Cthaeh.’

6 ~ Felurian 

I must be hard for Pat, waiting 20 years for someone to finally come along and solve his fiendish puzzle.  He’s placed all of his clues ‘just so’ to create the perfect puzzle, and yet nobody has managed to find them all or put them all together, which means that either we are all too thick, or that he has erred and made his clues simply too difficult for anyone to solve. If he ever decides to finally put us all out of our misery with a big answer to something important and goes on to explain, for instance, exactly how and why Felurian was actually the potential eighth Chandrian all along then everyone would of course believe him. However, If I were to attempt to explain the exact same answer using the self same clues in my own, unofficial, hypothesis, you would most likely just ignore it as the ramblings of just another lunatic or perhaps go as far as to try to find fault with it, and when that fails you would reach the conclusion that is simply too just many unlikely links needing to come together in the great chain of events for it all to work like that in real life. But this is not real life, this is fantasy fiction and Pat doesn’t waste ink.

If it is written down, then it is written down for a specific reason. It might just be one single word, or even an interpretation of a single word, but sometimes that is what it takes. Of course, if it was easy to do this then some clever lettuce would surely have done so by now, their’s would be the laurels and it would be their books that you are reading. But Pat is an evil genius and so it was never going to be that easy. Even if we did manage to find all of his little clues then we would still need to stitch them all together into whole cloth, a bit like sewing a shaed together made entirely out of pockets. However like it or not, these are the only links we have been given to work with and as far as I can discern there is only one possible way in which they can all be joined together into anything like a credible story knot… and it has only one conclusion

Felurian 

How did Felurian become the most famous fairy name in the 4Corners? What does her name actually mean? And Where did she actually originated from?

Three excellent questions and using my dictum as a key, and an awful lot of quotes from our books means we can now investigate her properly.

She is called the Lady of Twilight which marks twilight as being her own personal domain to rule over as she sees fit. Immortal and unchanging she spent time in Murella but was almost certainly a founding member of the Fae and is therefore must be counted at least as old as that realm is. Lady of the first quiet is another title of hers but that probably just refers to how she speaks. 

Now, if Fe = 4 and Lu =1 and Rian is a feminine version for 'of them' then her name will translate into mortal as something like the (female) Fourth One of Them where 'them' is going the be the Chandrian.

Bugger. It really wanted to be  seventh to make things simple didn't it. Not to worry though, Trapis can help us here although our path is getting a bit crooked and straightening it out will take a few pretty long quotes.

"In the end seven stayed on the other side of the line. Tehlu asked them three times if they would cross, and three times they refused. After the third asking Tehlu sprang across the line and he struck each of them a great blow, driving them to the ground."

We should note here that 7 is not 6 

"But not all were men. When Tehlu struck the fourth, there was the sound of quenching iron and the smell of burning leather. For the fourth man had not been a man at all, but a demon wearing a man's skin." 

This special case demon will definitely qualify as being 'the fourth one of them!' and Felurian is doubly so 'not a man!'

"When it was revealed, 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." 

This particular punishment is just a tiny bit different to being 'destroyed' which was the fate of all the other demons in the labd. This one was struck by iron, broken by hand and then sent back home but it also had it's name cursed, a small but important difference.

"After he was done Tehlu did not speak to the six who did not cross."

These are our Chandrian to be, and Encanis will make them 7. These six each betrayed their city on Lanre Day and were still unrepentant. They were also only iron struck a single time but once he had broken them, they we're not spoken to at all by Tehlu, let alone cursed as they surely must have been. Fortunately we already know all about the origins of a curse that does afflict them. These 6 were the original 'followers' of Lanre that Lord Selitos had already cursed in absentia some 2000 years before 

"Your own name will be turned against you, that you shall have no peace. This is my doom upon you and all who follow you. May it last until the world ends and the Aleu fall nameless from the sky."

This was their punishment for their betrayal. This was their curse and it should still be in full effect since the world has not ended... yet. Felurian, however should have escaped Seliros doom by dint of her not following Lanre's orders back on Lanre Day. Hence she escaped punishment from Selitos but received a different justice from Tehlu which is a strange case of double jeopardy. God apparently held a different fate for her. 

Back at the Waystone Inn Jake has a theory about the origins of the  Chandrian which he almost certainly must have learnt from Tehlin church version of things as written in their 'Book of the Path'

"They ain't demons," Jake said firmly. "They were the first six people to refuse Tehlu's choice of path, and he cursed them to wander the corners-"

I hope knotting all of that text together into an image is pretty self explanatory now that we can put names to numbers. This was Tehlu judging all seven of the possible Chan-D-Rian candidates and whilst 6(Hep) of them were apparently cursed to wander the mortal corners, the forth of them had her name cursed, and since he obviously couldn't kill her her she was instead despatched back to wander the outer darkness from whence she came. 

Now hold on a moment. Surely this would mean that Felurian must of remembered the lethani on Lanre Day and yet was still punished with the rest of of the traitors on Tehlu Day!  And yes, I suppose it means exactly that. It really depends on whether you consider life in a Faen paradise to be a punishment. I suppose the demonic part that Tehlu revealed might have possessed her during the intervening millennia, and that demon was exorcised from her and cast out into the true outer darkness but her own sentence was the slightly lesser one of exile into the twilight zone, that thin strip of the outer void which is neither darkness nor light but is technically a grey area, the middle ground between these two choices of path, a place where the lethani is in its element.

 I suppose you will want a map now and yes, I do have one, but I really wasn't expecting to go into the Fae yet. Still, the path must be followed so let's take a small excursion to the Fae before we get back to untangling all the loose threads of the mortal realm.

Track Record

Day and Night

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

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

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

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

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

There were no stars above us.

Grimward and Grinning

We are told that there are no compass points in Fae, but we can navigate by the stars if you know all their stories. The shapers who built the fae also made a star each ‘to light their new and empty sky’ and so the further from their light that you get, the further into the outer dark you go. Conversely the brighter it gets, the nearer to the centre you are. I imagine this would make Fae look like an LP record with Shaed Land being track one, Moth World making up track two, and The Twilit Pool being track three. Later on, Kvothe walked inwards through the trees of track four towards the brightening light of the horizon until all the trees finally ended their faen song… all bar one.

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

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

This centre, a deceptively large area which is at least half a mile from the the central lone tree in all directions which is a good bowshot for the Sithe archers to shoot crows over, is therefore the pin that marks the absolute centre of the Faen realm and is the area subjected to the most brighness since it is permanantly bathed by light of day. An eternal daylight to match Felurians eternal twilight in an eternal realm and this is almost certainly what makes it a perfect prison for an unseen oracle. The Cthaeh cannot leave it’s tree because it is fundamentally a creature of darkness , it is the Lord of Shadows and therefore cannot exist within light and the touch of any exposure to the sun in much the same way as it doesn’t like the smell of iron on Kvothe and moves further away from that too. Fire and Iron in any form are anathema and this sunlight burns worse than the iron bites. This means that the Fae is currently being used as a prison with walls made of light.  The Cthaeh is effectively in solitary confinement stuck in the middle and is forced to spend it’s entire eternal existence imprisoned and alone protected by the shaed of it’s own tree, which would make it officially ‘yoked to shadow…’ just like Lanre is back in Mortal. Outside of the illumination circle, the other demons can  still roam the darkness but their big bad boss demon is caught in perfect isolation within. The sithe are it's guards, which I suppose makes  Felurian their warden. And no other trees encroach on its cell, the only place in the entire realm where trees do not grow by order of a higher authority than they.

Whoever designed this prison did a pretty secure job, and this Faen prison is even remembered in Daeonica 

"Upon him I will visit famine and fire till all around him desolation rings and all the demons in the outer darkness will look on amazed and know that vengeance is the business of a man.

9 

Clue#3 Myr-elurian

When building the Empire of Ergen Pat decided that, for reasons of his own, having a pair of twin cities on the long lost lists of ancient Ergen was going to be an important part of his story. I have already written much about this anomaly and I’m sure that you can all see where this one is now heading. These two ‘twinned’ angel clues for Ordal and Andan are now almost certainly going to match up with the twin level of thinking behind twin cities.

Clearly then, After their o

The fact is that Pat gave us these last few small and obscure clues for a specific reason, to get us to this point where finding any further proof becomes a job for Anisat and his bean counters. This is the correct answer given in a confirmed triangle because no other answers about any other suspects exist, and Pat doesn’t waste ink. I’ll leave you to argue about the philosopy of that in your spare time but this answer is where my Jot is being wagered. Andan and Ordal’s relationship mirrors that of the Twin cities. One came from Murilla and one came from Murella. One came from a city which fell, and the other did not.

If we were allowed to consider using the French language as a key then it would be simple to work out which city went with the boy and which with the girl… but we can’t use French as a key in Temerant, alas, it’s simply not allowed. But we can suggest one further line of enquiry before we give up and guess which is really which. Felurian was also a resident of Murella, one of the twin-cities and she too survived the fall of Ergen which really ought to make her a ruach in her own right and therefore place her in the same room at the time, alongside Aleph and the Amyr and the Angels. That she is now a major feature of the faen realm opens up a whole new bag of difficult questions, such as how did she end up there? Did all of the other ruach go there too? Did her city stand or fall? Was Murella considered Her city, ruled over by her? Did she remember the lethani And Did she once have her own twin who met an opposite fate?

Pat’s giving us this small but important link between Felurian and Murella is another example of him not wasting ink whilst at the same time focussing our attenttion on the correct answer. If the clue exists, it should be solvable. The small steps that have led us here indicate that Felurian now has a 50% chance of coming from the city that was saved. That she is an important and powerful being to whom many chapters have been devoted only adds to the chances she is a winner and not a loser in life. Sex is also important here since, like Ordal, she is female and the thin line that divides our twins also takes this difference into consideration.

Now, Felurian has power, most specifically a power over men, all of whom are universally helpless before her desire. This would make made things rather awkward for any man found in Murella, be they the local residents or the unwanted invaders who might have wished to make Felurian the second woman to know the unwanted touch of man after fair Geisa met with this fate in the fall of Belen. Assuming that Felurian has always had this innate power over men would suggest the need for a rather neat and tidy solution to this problem of co-habitation within Ergen society, a solution that still exists in the University to this day. They kept the girls seperated from the boys by dint of building a wall between them, A wall which Felurian could happily sit upon eating fruit perhaps. If we are talking about a city divided like a Vintish penny is then the MurElla half was a city made up solely of women, and likewise the MurIlla half would have been the city of men, and so between them they would make up one whole city whilst at the same time still being essentially twin cities . Ordal was a girl, and Ordal’s city survived, QED so did Felurian’s. Which means that, using this logic, it would be the male half city of MurIlla which fell, whilst Felurian’s city of Murella was the one that did remember the Lethani and in doing so, saved Ergen.

meaning that this pattern is going to be the case for all of the other groups that were formed to oppose them in the aftermath of fall of the Ergen Empire.

This line of thinking would mean that the Amyr would also have one representative from each city in their ranks which would also give us an equivalent of Eight Amyr to match the total number of cities and Chandrian both. The Eight oath’s of Atreyon might mean something specific that relies upon the number as well as the oath. The total number of angels we can count for ourselves and at Eight angels (ignoring Tehlu as being the a special case*) it does indeed tally with the Seven chandrian in that each would have had historical roots to one specific city. The obvious objection about 8 not being 7 here is easily explained away because the chandrain are well known to be one person short from having a full complement due to them missing out on a representative from the city which was ultimately saved, whilst the Angels and the Amyr (and the Sithe!) would have no such numerical disadvantage when it came to picking their sides. I like to think this idea would appeal to Pat as it nicely mirrors Elrond setting the nine walkers to match the nine black riders in LOTR

'The names of the 7cities are forgotten, for they are fallen to treachery and destroyed by time.' 

Taking her words as being exactly correct reveals a tiny possible clue. 

The word 'And' here indicates that the treachery part did not destroy  7cities overnight. Time saw to the final destruction of Ergen which might offer us a window of possibility to consider. If destroying all 8 cities would have meant game over for Ergen, or to quote Selitos, 'the end of the world ' and this outcome did not happen then  Lanre's plan has obviously failed. Surely then the enemy emergency plan B would naturally be to finish the job by using their treacherous gains to lay siege to the one remaining city of hope.

We hear that Myr Tariniel fell, but whilst the architect of its downfall has disappeared in a puff of smoke, Selitos One-Eye was still there to search the ruins and organise any survivors and he is still to be regarded as a very powerful force to continue the battle. Six other Cities also fell under shadow that night and we must assume that it was the original Ergen city Lord's (and ladies) themselves who had treacherously betrayed Ergen and had 'gone over to the dark side' to seize total control. Now we do see six pillars of smoke rising and six is not 7 which tells both Lanre and Selitos that the war is not over yet but what if this smoke didnt physically destroy their city foundations. Just the important bit. 

Now Im about to paint a picture here. Try and pay attention.

Apocalypse in 7/8

Imagine if you will that each city of Ergen was built primarily around a Lighthouse. A tall tower housing an  ever burning lamp that , like Myr T did, sucked in the light to keep away thevdark.kept the darkness at bay. 

Perhaps it was like the Pharos of Alexandria and situated above a library, or temple of knowledge, but however you imagine it just think of it like a magical moon candle and the most important thing to the defenders is to keep these candles burning.

The goal of the enemy is to extinguish them all.

The 7 pillars of smoke are 7 snuffed candles .

Worm in fruit 

The morning after Lanre Day just One lighthouse remained with the rest now become Dark houses instead. Meaning that now the creatures of darkness could roam 7/8 of Temerant in their element.

Everyone fleeing should seek refuge beneath the last lit candle.

Even with their full house 8/8 master plan incomplete the Traitors will now have possession of 6 of these burnt out ruins for their own usage as future bases of operation for the hunting down of any Ergen survivors creating 6 ' kings' to lord it over 6 'castles' all attacking the final city of hope during that period of time that I have named the Demon Days.

The actual final destruction of everything Ergen did not then come about until many years after Lanre Day during the last days of the reign of their demonic overlord Encanis.

'For six days Encanis fled, and six great cities he destroyed. But on the seventh day, Tehlu drew near before Encanis could bring his power to bear and the seventh city was saved' (again!)

When examining the Lockless box, Kvothe guesses it's age to be about 3000 years old and Meluan appears to agree with his estimate. Assuming they are both close to the truth that ties in with my Lady Perial theory gives us a similar approximation as to the date of Tehlu Day and therefore this 3000 years ago number could also be considered the end of DD and mark year when the true Inception of the 4Corners of civilization and also when the era of the modern day wandering Adem began. 2000 years between is a pretty good number when contemplating the lifespan of a crumbling occupied city as Master Kilvin says even 1000 years is a lot to ask of stone.

Anyway. 

3000 years ago is one possible date for the the dawn of the modern Adem era and 5000 years ago seems a likely a date for the fall of those originalAdem of Ergen stock leaving  2 millennia in-between for Alaxel and his handful of rhinta generals to terrorise any remaining Ergen survivors from the comfort of their 6 power bases. Except that one of these power bases did not fall on Lanre Day meaning those citizens who remembered the lethani were still resisting them from behind the walls of  the one city of hope. 

[Diagram]

Then along came Tehlu and rounded up all these rhinta and cursed them to wandering. During his pursuit of Encanis Trapis says six cities fell and this, I think, would actually be the second time that this happened. Lanre may have first burnt them , the Chandrian may have second occupied them, Encanis may have third destroyed them but Tehlu fourth wiped the map clean of them afterwards. And that is how I tie up Pats loose ends. 6 of These cities fell twice, and One city never fell at all. 

"Long ago the Adem were upheaved from our rightful place. Something we cannot remember drove us out. Someone stole our land, or ruined it, or made us flee in fear."

Now who is this someone? In chronological order we have our suspects Lanre? Encanis? Tehlu? Other? . Let's consider the words 'something we they cannot remember ' first and ask why not? Collective amnesia? That's going to involve cause and effect so what might have caused it? A collective blow on the head perhaps? Or should that be three blows, all from Tehlu's iron hammer? 

But remember him or not,  the Adem don't believe in Tehlu, and we are done with Gods for a while. They probably don't believe in Encanis either, or have likewise forgotten him, and they also know that there are no such things as demons, or rather all memory of demons has been forgotten, too. They don't know much about faeries for that matter since Tempi didn't even know who Felurian was making gods, demons and faeries just barbarian tales told by priests and campsite entertainers. So we need a different answer to play about with one that's got some substance to real life, something believable that will tick the most boxes and preferably someone with a name. Vashet might not know of them, that's above her pay grade, but the top brass A-women do believe in Rhinta which makes the list of names they do remember as the most likely suspects regarding the original forgotten enemy of their race. 

Next we hear that 'Someone stole our land, or ruined it, or made us flee in fear.' now that sounds to me like there was an invasion by a barbarian enemy to me, and in all probabability it was the Aturan Empire leading the charge. Now in Kvothe's first admissions he included in his brief history of Atur the line 'They antagonised the Adem' which is a definite written  link that the Adem and Atur were enemies and that gives us two good pins in the ground on which to build a storyline that leads up to the present day.

Children of Genocide.

'We were forced to wander endlessly. Our whole nation mendicant like beggars... Finally we found this thing windy place, unwanted by the world'.

We can only guess how long it was before they finally settled in Ademre but I very much doubt they found their holy latantha tree waiting for them when they arrived qed they planted it themselves upon arrival. From a magic tree seed, is all tree one tree? Unlike the greystone by the stone trial which probably was.

 [Tree angles?]

So we have the Adem of today being refugees from the place they lived before. So where might that place have been? Well that question will take us down a different path and we can only explore one path at a time so put it on the back burner with the rest but spoiler alert, suffice to say it was one of the 7 cities of the Ergen empire.

But back to our more modern refugees tale. What could possibly make them all not know what just happened to them. Well my theory runs something like this. 

About 1000 years ago, the Empire of Atur decided it had  grown strong enough to eradicate the Adem from the face of the world. Let us suggest, without qualification, that the city of the Adem was Tinüe. The empire, driven by the Church and led by the Amyr, antagonised the Adem people and either killed them on the spot or took them in chains back to Amyr Gibeas concentration camp where he did dreadful things to them, probably to find out what made them tick. Eventually, all the Adem that remained retreated to Tinüe. Before that city fell to the foreign  invaders, the city elders ordered everyone to the walls with orders to fight to the death rather than suffer the alternatives. The pregnant women were deemed especially important to the enemy invaders who were also curious about their biology. To preserve hope for their race against overwhelming odds, a small group of women, possibly the pregnant ones, escaped through some secret passage or door or whatever to safety. Perhaps they made it through the mountains and into the Tahl where they resided in exile until the power of Atur collapsed and it was safe to come home again. Those few who escaped were those who were too small to understand what had just happened to their nation. Obviously these last survivors carried their swords in their hands and their swords atas in their heads. But individual obituary lines like 'so and so died defending others from unspecific atrocities' won't form  much of a historical picture today and the Adem exodus would have been a very long one. Likely one of centuries not decades of wandering and hardship and so by the time they all stopped running and had the opportunity to write anything down in a history book, much or their story has been lost along the way. However, I do like to think that it was their leader Magwyn who was the one who finally led them into Haert and once there, the new generation of Adem began putting down roots and thus all Adem-Re was founded from a handful of stories and on the memories of babes. Etymology

Can we get a clue about when? Sort of. Since they didn't bring their sacred tree with them as a lucky pot plant so it can only have arrived there in seed form. So the age af Ademre is as old as a very mature weird tree. Tree angles

Branching out

A lot of time has now passed. Children have grown up, had children or their own then died along the way, their names , swords and deeds remembered only in atas. 

Now the main point here is that when they first 'fled in fear' they were too young to understand what was happening. By the time they reached an age to ask questions, their few remaining guardians would be older too and memories fade when unvisited. Dangerous times led to silence and stillness being the order of the day in order to survive. . Talk with hands, no loud noises, no musical instruments! No history lessons just survial lessons to no sex education lessons either. These innocents  were left to discover their own path and the past was a different country. 

So what would the job of the youngest be in such a camp. Tending flocks of course, two lines say this is kids work. So when we hear a different quote with a different clue. It naturally makes us think of sheep, or goats if you are clever, but I like to think it means these flocks were the children.

The tale of aether and rethe was a tale of two older kids. Eldest girl, eldest boy. Which one knows best.

Some perhaps the women used swords and the men bows. 

Some split off to form the Edema -ruh etymology. Ravel end of the Adem . Lost sheep returned to the fold. 

.

Are the names Sheyehn speaks the same handful of rhinta that are worse than the rest? Are they specific enemies of Adem or just casually 1/8 ? Who are the rest? What do they think of Amyr? Of Gibea? 

Where did their tree come from?

There are so many possibilities for fanfic . The 9&90 tales might be the tales of the wanderers. Some sought refuge at lady perials house, when the soldiers came to seize the mutants she sent them through the door in the mountains that led to the tahl. With her husband Illian bearing his candle to light their way perhaps...

The Amyr wanted to wipe out the grey eyed  mutants for being different. They did some horrible things towards the end. Taborlin the great helped when and where he could and eventually the empire collapsed because they could not eradicate them root and branch. Queen Perial told the pontifex to cross the road.

Which side of the path?

It all comes back to children. No one taller than the stone.

In fact they are quite nice to us.

In 1Corner the underlying observation was that like a copper penny, everything is broken. In a land of ha'penny The Adem seem to be the only whole people left. 

If Kvothe's guess about iron copper in the wood is also correct hints at these names being 2/3 of it's total long name composition. But a lot of folk have suggested that copper does not have a name which would act as a very secure way of making sure it stays shut. 

Perhaps one of the words forsworn is the name of copper. The lock them could never be opened by anyone or thing since the copper name locking key cannot be replicated . 

 If the box was indeed shaped using the name of wood that would explain it's longevity since shapenware does not corrode or rust or wear away, not even a tiny bit. That indicates to me that even the faint 'carving' on it Kvothe felt will be a deliberate feature and remain in exactly the same condition as the day it was made, implying it's not actually carved at all but was made that way. The proof of that assumption is because tools don't exist that could carve this box. If I wanted to read it I would take a brass rubbing to highlight the pattern, which will probably reveal a message in the written language of the time but I'm not there so I guess we shall never know... 

The city of the silver eyed folk would have just begun their modern exodus no more than three thousand years ago and that's a long time to forget things. 

The Adem today are not the same thing as the Ergen Fae quote

This gives us two different Adem to investigate, the old and the new but recent first in reverse chronology. Build the house from the roof down. Writing history is done this way, youngest first. Once again we can probably choose a date when one stopped and the other started and again we gave the dates of Lanre day and Tehlu Day as the most likely catalysts for change. So either 3000 or 5000 years ago the new Adem take begun with something they cannot remember. 

Different branches of the tribe live in different locations but this thing is forgotten by all. Neither of vashet' s schools teach what happened. but between them all Ademre thay they have carried a few old relics things with them like swords and candles and seeds and stories.

and their most recent antagonist will be the favourite nd if it was the most recent, that attack might well have eradicated all written memories at a stroke, if they were housed in the burnt down library of Caluptena for example