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swordandscytheandpen · 10 days

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Breaking into book five and ANAXARES IS BACK BABEY! And physically described for what I think is the first time.

Tanned in the way of the Free Cities, he was dressed like a beggar in worn robes too loose on his frame. Which was thin, though not the thinness of the heathy. He looked like he’d had too many lean meals, or perhaps like the fire in those grey eyes had eaten away at his body from the inside. The Hierarch of the League of Free Cities, for this could not be anyone else, was middle-aged and balding. His eyebrows were thick and bushy, both they and his sparse beard warring between white streaks and dark brown. One of his boots, I could not help but notice, had been so poorly sown back on the sole was coming off at the front. I looked at him, saw him scribbling on a clay tablet while intently following the proceedings, and felt the slightest bit of fear. He looked like no one, I thought. But coming from his body like an invisible current was some deep and terrible power the touch of which could be felt over all of Rochelant. It was not reaching into my mind, not yet, but it felt as if raising my hand would allow me to feel the unseen ripples.

"He looked like no one, I thought." Ohh yes yes yes, that's not insignificant. Names are reflected in their holders' appearances, and this is a very different kind of "looking like no one" than you get with, say, Scribe. Anaxares' appearance reflects the fact that he sees himself as an ordinary everyman, as part of the People. This is another point of evidence to my other post: Amadeus is mad at the gods because they're unfair to villains; Anaxares is mad because they're unfair to everyone.

Now, while I of course fully expected Hierarch to be behind the mobs — it was pretty heavily implied, though that might admittedly have been my own wishes — I'm fascinated by how powerful the effect seems to be:

“That’s an aspect,” Indrani said, voice hushed. “Gods, how can that be an aspect?” “Andronike?” I asked. The crow-goddess did not reply for a long moment, until I turned my head to look at her. If a bird could look uncomfortable, I saw, it would be something like this. “This is… difficult,” Andronike said, voice tight. “The pull is strong.” My fingers clenched. “You’re having a hard time fighting him,” I croaked. “What the Hells is this, Andronike? He’s Named, not…” “Faith,” the crow got out. “This is faith, Catherine Foundling. Pure unadulterated belief, untainted by doubt or hesitation. It sings, and the world sings back.” “Faith in what?” I asked. “Nothing,” Andronike hissed. “A snake eating its own tail. It is bleak madness screamed by endless throats, and it would stand tribunal over the Gods themselves.”

... I really was expecting Anaxares to be... subtler, I guess. Raw power and supernatural influence certainly weren't what I thought I'd see, at any rate, though the display might seem subtler to ordinary folk. Clearly there have been some internal developments since his run-in with the Bard. What's the aspect, I wonder? Incite? Instigate? It clearly relies on others — I wonder if it could be deployed against an army, or even the Dead King's forces? The latter I doubt, but the former could be a fascinating challenge for Catherine if applied to her own forces.

I have two guesses for how this could be employed in the story: number one, the Serenity. Nobody seems to have any real thoughts on how to deal with the Dead King's personal Hell yet, and this seems like one of the few things that could make a dent without causing mass death. That said, it feels, narratively, more like the Serenity will eventually be some kind of big challenge for Cat. Having to choose between slaughtering a huge group of mostly innocents (Evil But Effective Choice) and trying in vain to convince them to turn against Neshamah (Good But Useless Choice) seems like the sort of story beat that would fit better for her. I guess I can also see that happening and then deploying the Hierarch as a sort of compromise, cheating the story yet again, but I dunno, it doesn't click for me quite.

The second possibility, which I see as more narratively plausible, is that the Hierarch will end up killing some big-name hero who publicly oversteps. This would probably take the form of: some hero (probably Hanno, Judgment is his whole thing) makes the unilateral decision of killing a villain, maybe Black or Kairos, who has recently done something helpful and/or proven themself useful. The hero commits this murder in a public setting, the general public is pissed about it, and Anaxares' aspect incites or empowers the People to tear the hero limb from limb. But this prediction has its own problems, in that it denies Anaxares the chance to actually transcend the games of Names. This scenario would suborn the People into a weapon in the contest between Named, and unless I've misread Anaxares' Role, that doesn't really fit either.

So I suppose what I mean to say is, I have no idea what might happen with this aspect, and the above two paragraphs were basically short-form fanfic.

As for the faith part, this brings to mind the idea of "true faith" some modern vampire media like VTM uses, where faith in anything has a material effect, so long as it's faith. (Was it Doctor Who that had the vampires repelled by the faithful Communist?) Has there been any previous indication that Creation runs on belief-rules? There's Sve Noc, at least, brought to power by constant implicit sacrifice. But I don't recollect any other use of faith as a material force. We haven't been enlightened as to the intricacies of priestly powers, so it could be that the Lanterns get their juice from their own faith... but it could also be gifts from the Gods. We don't have a ton of evidence either way here, as far as I remember.

Still, "standing tribunal over the Gods themselves" is exactly what I was hoping for, and it's what I sensed a whiff of in my post on Anaxares' confrontation with the Wandering Bard. Anaxares is similar to Amadeus in that he opposes the Gods and what they have deemed for the world, but the details of his view are vastly different.

Black, though he might kill me for saying so, operates off of spite. I don't remember the passage, but he has said that he seeks victory for Evil "to prove it can be done," or something along those lines. He's so furious at the state of Creation that he wants to invert it. Anaxares doesn't. He believes in a different authority entirely.

“You are Cordelia Hasenbach,” the man stated, half-questioningly. A moment passed, while I was genuinely at a loss for words. Ah, I thought. So this is why the Tyrant thinks he can make a pawn of you. For a heartbeat I debated actually pretending I was the First Prince just to see if I could make some trouble for her, but discarded the notion just as quick. Best not to roll dice when they had teeth and a noted fondness for biting. “Catherine Foundling,” I replied. “Queen of Callow.” If he felt embarrassed about the mistake, he didn’t show it in the slightest. “There’s no such thing,” he told me sternly. “Queens or Catherine Foundling?” I said. “Because one of those debates is a lot more philosophical than I’m equipped to handle.”

Hee hee. But it is fascinating just how divorced Anaxares is becoming from worldly affairs. He started as a diplomat, remember — originally, he may have been wholly subordinate to the First and Greatest of the Free Cities, but he was still very involved in foreign affairs. He's changed a ton since the start, and some fraction of this change was since his run-in with the Bard. Names tend to do this to people, it seems, separate them from reality in favor of their ideals, but they don't do that without personal development and/or a story behind the shift.

“Is this why the League has gone to war?” I asked. “To end crowns?” There wasn’t a single thing that changed about him, I thought. He was still a skeleton of a man in ill-fitting robes, a scarecrow with a scowl. Not a single thing had changed, and yet… If I strained the ear, I could hear the chorus. The howls of the mob. Chains ripped apart, palaces toppled and bones being crushed. Torches starting a fire that would spread across the world. A song of revolt, of rebellion. I could feel it, like warm wine running through my veins. It was harsh and unforgiving, but oh how glorious it was. How easy it would have been to partake of it and let that warmth swallow me whole. “We are all of us free or we are none of us free,” the Hierarch of the League of Free Cities said, voice like steel. “There is no middle ground. And for the lashes struck at our back, all will be called to account – if gallows must be raised for devils and angels alike, so be it.” I almost, out of sheer contrariness, pointed out that devils did not die but only disperse. But would they really, if it was this man passing the sentence? Suddenly I was not so certain. My mistake, I thought, had been trying to think of him as either a terror or a fool. Fear had dogged me, wading through his aspect, but it had retreated as we spoke. As the man proved to be so uninterested in his surrounding as to be lost. I’d allowed the cadenced little phrases, the obvious mistakes and ignorance, to lull me into believing him… adrift. Living in his own world. But Black had warned me about people like this, hadn’t he? About Named who did not see Creation as it was but how it should be. Men and women who embraced their vision so deeply they bent the world around them to match it. My mistake, I thought once more, had been to believe he must be only one of the two. He was not. The Tyrant of Helike had not sharpened this blade so carefully to cut a mortal empire, I decided. There was a broader game unfolding.

So where's Kairos aiming? The Heavens and Hells don't seem like the kind of entites capable of rising in revolt, even with an effect this strong. The Bard is a clear and obvious enemy of the Tyrant's, and one shared by Anaxares at that, but this isn't the kind of weapon that can hurt her. She doesn't have cities or armies, she's pretty much as divorced from that as possible. Hell, she could be excommunicated from every society on Calernia and still be almost as effective. I can't see the broader picture here, and it's frustrating. As much as I love him, this story does not end with Anaxares victorious; that's not how this works. He isn't going to liberate everyone.

But it's conceivable that he carves out a larger republic somewhere, and that republic works as an engine of... whatever this is all on its own. That sounds plausible, albeit not likely. It fulfills the "fire that would spread across the world" Cat hears, and surely Anaxares understands that he can't just go to every single city on Calernia and start riots. We don't even know what this place is going to look like after he leaves. But of course Anaxares has an answer to the "how are you going to win" question:

“War against Calernia,” he said amusedly. “As if tearing down masters was the same thing as warring on their slaves. You betray yourself, tyrant. You think I wage war on them?” The stylus flicked at the crowd of Procerans. The axe went up, the axe went down. Another dead man, dragged into the alley. “The old faceless thing bade me to choose a side,” the Hierarch said. “And at long last, I have.” My eyes narrowed. The old faceless thing. There weren’t a lot of entities out there that would fit that epithet. Anaxares of Bellerophon smiled, crooked teeth bared. “You think us outnumbered?” he said. “How many of us are there, tyrant, and how many of you?”

Again, he was a diplomat. Anaxares may not be so very smart, but his understanding isn't that shallow. He's got to know that it'll take more than a few loose sparks for the world to go up in flame. Which means he's not being entirely forthright with Cat, he's mostly antagonizing her, like in his letters. His only real goal can be to strike a blow against the Gods, or more likely, their proxy — though that is difficult for reasons stated above.

But there's something else I want to talk about. See, I got a fair few chapters into Book Five while I sat on this post.

Okay, fine, I got to chapter 72. What do you want from me.

But the point is that, having come back to this post fresh off the coup attempt in Salia, I see a parallel. Anaxares views his chosen mortal ideology as above even the Gods, and is strongly implied to have the power to enforce that. Cordelia is exactly the same. She sees the rule of Proceran law as superior to the law of Above, and is able to exercise that power to such extent that she forces a Name back down. It's not the same ideology, sure, but it's mortal. That's the important part. This is the start of a pattern, and we know how those work in the Guide.

And it's no coincidence that these two cases — Cordelia and Anaxares exercising their very human ideologies — are the only two times we've actually seen the Wandering Bard upset, angry, and even surprised. I think I'm starting to see the shape of this story, mortal beliefs triumphing over Above and Below, and if it's followed through on it could be very impressive.

#mine #long post #apgte #pgte #a practical guide to evil #practical guide to evil #anaxares #sorry that this post isn't so long as it could be. i've got a limited amount of juice to spend on active pursuits #e.g. writing analyses of niche web serials that only a couple thousand people have read

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