#ANYWAY i'm really personally obsessed with the idea that terribend is preservation-aligned

[words-writ-in-starlight]

What of the Three Faces of God do you think The Master's generation is associated with? Obviously Tirandys and Bender don't have their Shanir powers anymore but before their fall.

Are you the same anon who sent me the amazing ask about Jame and Tori finding each other beautiful?  I don’t care, but please keep sending me excuses to write essays about obscure bits of this series.

So, first things first, let’s define some systems, shall we?  Based on what we’ve seen, most individual Shanir abilities are aligned with one Face or another, with a few exceptions that appear across the board (binding of all kinds, which makes sense, as well as some aspects of soulwalking), but you can sometimes get a mix of Faces in an individual, depending on their abilities.  The Tyr-ridan are presumably all one thing, sort of the elemental form of Shanir power, and so are all potential Nemeses, who are always Destruction.  Working from that assumption, and other explicitly listed alignments, here are some abilities we know for sure are aligned to one Face:

CREATION: seeing the future, the “overgrowth” stunt that Torisen accidentally pulls in Gates of Tagmeth, forcing the truth from someone (Torisen and Kirien, notably)

PRESERVATION: healing, possibly including resurrection, the more extreme aspects of soul- and dreamwalking, blood-sight (Adiraina, explicitly Preservation-aligned)

DESTRUCTION: claws, true berserker flares, malediction (Brenwyr), soul reaping, tempting (the Tempter, as well as Jame), weakness-finding (as on the Dark Judge)

Side note: Jame’s other primary Shanir ability that we do not see in other people is using the Book.  This isn’t uniquely a Shanir trait (even Theocandi sort of used the Book), but I would posit that either Jame is some kind of Master Rune savant, or the ability to use the Book with any kind of survival rate is the sole prerogative of a very niche kind of Shanir.  The Book can’t be memorized, even by Jame, but Jame can recall and use runes from the very end of the thing!  The “rupture” rune she half-uses in Seeker’s Mask is from the end of the Book, and Jame almost blows out half of Gothregor’s eardrums with it, despite not having the Book within fifty miles of her.  Nominal nod to this ability being a potential fringe artifact of Destruction, or of a Shanir over a specific power threshold.

Other Shanir abilities that we aren’t given a strict alignment for include distance writing, Highborn command (I would posit that this is distinct from but related to both tempting and forcing the truth), hag riding, Timmon’s unnatural charm (said to run in his family, also related to tempting/command/forced truth), soul-carrying, and whatever shade-sight allows Trishien to see Ganth.  Shapeshifting is not listed here because that is gained from changer blood.  Offhand, I’m going to say that hag riding is probably Destruction, and shade-sight is...maybe Preservation?  Kindrie can also interact with Willow far more than your average Kencyr, even Tori.  Soul-carrying and Command are both demonstrably Face-neutral, like binding, and purely for the sake of symmetry I’m inclined to assign charm to Preservation, to match forced truth for Creation and tempting for Destruction.  I usually think of Trishien as Preservation-aligned and Kirien as Creation-aligned, which would also make far-writing Face-neutral.  But that’s just me making stuff up.

Anyway!  That’s what we know for sure about Shanir alignments, so now we’ll go from there to talk about the alignments of the Master’s generation.  God, I hope my read-more is working again.

So!  There are two ways to look at this, one based on narrative evidence and one based on narrative structure, but they have the same outcome.  I’m going to talk about the second one first, because it’s not as interesting to me--it’s just a little chat about cyclical epics and the way the Master’s generation and Jame’s generation mirror each other.

So, if we look at it from the assumption that the Master’s generation is universally a narrative equivalent to Jame’s, Jamethiel and Jame are obviously Destruction.  This is demonstrably true regardless--Jamethiel was definitely the Nemesis in the Fall, even though she wasn’t actually the impetus.  The Master and Tori are also direct equivalents, even Tori draws the connection between them, which makes him definitively Creation.  I’ll talk about how I think this is supported by narrative evidence later.  And then, of course, there is no Preservative aspect of the Tyr-ridan in the Master’s generation, wherein lies the problem--the Tyr-ridan have to be pure Knorth, and Tyrandis and Terribend are half Randir, and Keral yet a further step removed to be half Randir Highborn and half Kendar.  However, I think it’s clear that Tyrandis and Terribend, between them, are a good parallel for Kindrie (the one loyal to the end to a Master who doesn’t want him, and the one loyal to the end to his own code of honor, even at the cost of his soul), implying them to be Preservation aligned by this argument.  And Keral, of course, is Bane’s predecessor, the previous heir to half-Highborn homicidal Shanir madness.  Bane doesn’t actually show a lot of Shanir talents besides blood binding and I think there’s a viable case to be made that he doesn’t have many, and I’m guessing Keral is the same.  Gonna tag them both for Destruction, though, because Bane and Jame are antiparallels, it’s why he’s obsessed with her, that is a separate essay though so just take my word for it.

That’s the narrative structure argument, basically.  The Kencyrath are an epic, and an epic about cycles and patterns--the war fought and lost on world after world, the children fighting to be their parents or be anything but, the ever-diminishing returns on their battles.  We know the alignments of Jame’s generation, and the Master’s generation was Final Battle: Mark I, so by narrative structure we can extrapolate.

In terms of narrative evidence, we actually don’t have a ton--changers lose their Shanir abilities, and Gerridon seems to be operating at a deficit when it comes to Creation powers.  So we’re about to get speculative in this part.  Jamethiel is Destruction, through and through, I don’t think we need to discuss it at length.  Gerridon is either pure Preservation or pure Creation, and I stand by my above theory that he’s Creation--not just because he’s Tori’s narrative predecessor, but because he loses a hand.  Now, it’s possible that he’s a powerful Shanir healer who is, for some reason related to Perimal Darkling, unable to access his soulscape (literally can’t imagine what his soulscape looks like, wouldn’t blame him for avoiding it).  But I tend to think not.  The Master sacrificed his people, his honor, his consort, and pretty goddamn nearly himself for immortality.  You know what that blind, irrational terror of death reminds me of?  Torisen, so half-mad with fear of the nightmare that showed him his father’s death that he nearly killed himself running straight into the Southern Wastes in hopes of getting away.

Yeah, I think the Master is a Creation-aligned far-seer.  Why does he keep getting out-maneuvered anyway?  Because the Master’s House is outside the normal flow of time.  He lives in the past, in the days when the House was well-kept and magnificent, and he pays for it with what could be his best advantage.  Out in Rathillien, though, the Dreamweaver and even the Master both tend to show up in...let’s call them highly coincidental moments.  Partly an advantage of the House, I’m sure, but maybe not entirely.

Now, the changers give up their Shanir powers for immortality, so all of this is guesswork.  I’m prepared to suppose that Keral, half-Kendar, probably wasn’t a powerful enough Shanir to be a going concern, but purely based on his rampant overuse of the deepest rooms and rapid degradation (he can’t hold a form at all, but Tyrandis “can never get the eyes right” despite being exactly the same age, suggesting that they’re at the two extremes of how quickly changers burn through their shelf life) I’m inclined to say Destruction.  As the Dreamweaver demonstrates, Destruction can also be self-Destruction and, lacking further indications, I’m guessing that Keral went hard in that direction.

Tyrandis...Tyrandis and Terribend, we know very little about.  Tyrandis is a changer and Bender lost his soul, and presumably his Shanir abilities with it, so we never see them use anything that would give us an indication one way or another.  Bender taught Jame to read the Master Runes, though, and they’re twins, so we know that they were both strong, as Shanir go, because being able to read and use Runes requires a lot of juice.  It’s possible that Tyrandis held out against the corrupting influence of the deepest rooms through a link to Creation, it’s possible that Bender is able to resist the corruption of the House by the same virtue that Jame can hold out against Rawneth, Destructive snakes of similar venom.  I could probably make a case for any alignment for the two of them, given enough time to cook one up.

Personally I tend to think that they’re both nominally Preservation aligned, as I mentioned above.  This is because they hold out better than anyone save the Master himself, and they don’t have the protection of Gerridon’s deal with Perimal Darkling.  In fact, Bender was so capable of resisting that he didn’t have his soul taken until he “slipped, for just a moment,” and that’s so reminiscent of Kindrie, emerging from the walled garden of his soul for one moment and finding himself locked out, that I tend to think that Bender had to be a soulwalker.  Tyrandis...God only knows what Tyrandis could do before he lost his abilities and his honor to stay loyal to his lord.  But soulless Terribend and corrupted Tyrandis are still the most themselves of anyone in that forsaken dimension, and that says Argentiel to me.

#kencyrath #chronicles of the kencyrath #jamethiel dreamweaver #tyrandis #terribend #A N O N!!!!!! THANK YOU FOR THIS #if you don't know anything about the kencyrath and my readmore is still busted i'm so sorry i just...i couldn't NOT #i have so many long posts languishing in my drafts half-finished right now because i don't know if my readmores work #and like. that taz au of the untamed? yeah that's a long boy. don't want that on people's dash without a cut. #BUT THIS!!!!!! i couldn't not post this. it's like. An Essay. and i loved writing it so much. #please send me every niche Fantasy Lit 406 essay question you've ever idly considered about the kencyrath #ANYWAY i'm really personally obsessed with the idea that terribend is preservation-aligned #...hmmm i'm realizing actually that BANE doesn't have a soul for most of the time we know him #so he may have other shanir abilities not easily accessible to him without a soul #i'm also into the idea of tyrandis as preservation because...well. even poisoning jame is an act of preservation is it not? #he's trying to see to the master's inevitable demise as a way of (hopefully) preserving the chain of creation. #and the idea of the brothers as the passive and active sides of preservation (respectively) is fascinating and tragic to me #ALSO. THE MASTER IS A CREATION-ALIGNED FARSEER. I'LL TAKE NOTES AS I REREAD THE BOOKS BUT SERIOUSLY GET ON BOARD WITH THIS #asked and answered #Anonymous