***SPOILERS***
The
Prologue was a work of art. It’s nice to see a clever idea that’s cleverly
done. It talks of three silences within the Waystone Inn. The first is because
the tavern lacks its usual noise. The second is because the people inside
choose not to talk, choose to be silent. The third was in the regular actions
of the bar keep (so he made that silence). The silences are the ‘sound of the
man waiting to die.’ One pay in and it’s already dark and macabre.
The Inn
Innkeeper
Kote lives in Newarre, a village in the Commonwealth. The most frequent
measurement in a ‘span’, equal to eleven days.
The
younger patrons listen to Old Cob’s story (never his advice) and the reader
gets background info on the world. Tehlu founded the main religion. Taborin the
Great is an oft-mentioned hero. Aleph created the world and named everything;
Aleph, of course, being like ‘alpha’, i.e. the first. But perhaps the most
relevant lore is that of the Chandrian, evil individuals that come with warning
signs like rotting wood and blue fire. One nice description is that they’re
‘yoked to shadows’.
Carter
carries a scrael, a giant spider, into the inn. The shape, colour and textures
of the scrael are described so well. Texture’s often missed out in descriptions
so it’s good to see it done, let alone done well. Carter opens the blanket on
purpose and yet it still makes him recall. His response of surprise and/or
shock seems unwarranted. When Kote lists all the ways a scrael can be killed,
someone mentions God which Kote agrees to in a begrudging manner.
Kote’s
student is Bast, a cloven-hooved fae who calls his master ‘Reshi’ and is
infused with confidence and a ‘casual grace’. Like in folklore, iron hurts the
fae, so much so that he complains how primitive ‘you people are’ for using iron
needles.
Kote asks Bast to listen three times
and Bast confirms he has three times. Is this to go with the three silences?
Kote keeps on persuading Bast to
study and the pupil does pick up a big book. To crush a walnut, to be sure, but
at least he picked it up. That was great.
Even after an hour of mopping, the
water’s clean. We know Kote can’t use magic so this must be Bast.
Kote is bored with life. His magic
and music are dead. He thinks the war is his fault. Bast is searching for
someone to make Kote feel and live again.
Bast tells Kote for sneaking off and
only leaving a note. ‘What am I, some dockside whore?’ Bearing in mind Bast is
the apprentice, how can Kote be the one to sneak out? This just shows Bast’s
fondness for Kote, like how Bast brushes Kote’s hair like a mother would.
(Although when a note reads ‘I am probably dead’, anger’s to be expected. I
wasn’t expecting anything like that in the note so it surprised a laugh out of
me.)
We’re
introduced to the Chronicler.
He knows who Kote really is: Kvothe.
This scares the innkeeper, going so far as to ‘commit the room to memory’,
because he has a bounty on his head. To be expected when you’re the
‘Kingkiller’, I suppose.
The Chronicler wants Kote’s life
story. Although he agrees to tell it, Kote threatens to not let the Chronicler
go after knowing what he knows. The threat made the Chronicler change his plans
to suit Kote’s wants, even though the substance of the threat was non-existent.
The Chronicler can transcribe any
language thanks to his cipher which represents sounds, not letters. Different
languages can have different sounds to each other so I hope he researched
foreign languages!
Kote learns from the Chronicler that
some people think Kvothe is the new Chandrian. This deeply unnerves Kote. It’s
unsurprising, considering he didn’t hide his obsession with the Chandrian from
anyone.
Lore
The
Chandrian are the driving force of the narrative. Kvothe wants to research them
and decides the University’s Archives will be most useful.
In
his youth, Kvothe returns to camp and finds the troupe slaughtered. All the
warning signs of the Chandrian are present, as are the beings themselves. The
one that grabs his focus most (now and in the future) is Cinder. (Nice: fiery
name for fiery monsters.)
Haliax
states that he keeps his fellow Chandrian safe from the Amyr, the Sithe and the
singers. We know about the first two but the last’s not spoken of again. The
Chandrian did kill the troupe because Kvothe’s father was composing a song
about the Chandrian so maybe that’s something to do with it? I’m looking
forward to this being revealed.
The
key to sympathy/magic is ‘Alar’, willing something to happen.
For example, a sympathetic link can
be established between two coins, and lifting one lifts the other. The more
similar two items are, the stronger their link so the easier it is to influence
each other. (Kvothe says this is a circular argument, but it’s not. I can’t
think for the life of me why he thinks it is.)
Links aren’t perfect so energy is
lost (lifting the two coins feels like lifting three). The weaker the link, the
more energy is required. So the lore expands the concept of sympathy magic in
real-world folklore yet expands it to fit in with the rules of physics.
Kvothe
met Skarpi in Tarbean. The old man told a story where Lanre, a hero in the
Tehlan religion, became the first Chandrian Haliax. Tehlan priests arrest
Skarpi for heresy but he states he has friends in the church. (No doubt this
will be an important detail to remember.)
The story foreshadowed Lanre’s fate:
he kills a beast with ‘breath of darkness’ and wore its scales that felt like
‘a skin of shadows’ (perfect foreshadowing as this matches the Chandrain).
Lanre died so his lover Lyra
brought him back to life. When Lyra died, Lanre couldn’t bring her back to life
(even after making ‘a terrible trade’). Lanre committed suicide but Lyra’s
magic brought Lanre back to life.
The story also paints Amyr as
people, including Tehlu, turned into beings with fiery wings by Aleph. Officially,
the Amyr were church knights that disappeared when the Aturan Empire collapsed
three hundred years ago.
This threw me at first because the
Aturan Empire is still in the map and when a country’s described as collapsed,
it means it stops existing. But here the author uses ‘collapse’ as in the
empire collapsed in size. As if it could no longer support its own weight. This
was truly clever.
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