The Ascension of the Thirteen
The Fourteen minus one all die inside four decades, and the essence that was concentrated in them is released into everybody.
This is the single most important event in the saga's backstory. Every power system in every later volume dates from it.
The Virtues become their principles
They do not die so much as dissolve into the thing they were.
- Aquila, year 31X. The River Kyth stops mid-flow. She can no longer weave fast enough, and chooses to stop being a person doing it: "The balance doesn't need a person to maintain it. It needs to be the space between things. The pause between heartbeats." Balance stops being imposed and becomes something people choose moment by moment.
- Rogen Thorne, year 32X. The Gazette burns with silver fire that consumes lies and leaves truth. His last headline: EVERYTHING ENDS. WHAT MATTERS IS HOW HONESTLY WE LIVED. Afterwards lies remain possible but harder to hold, and truth impossible to fully suppress.
- Zephine, year 33X. She has run out of stories and started repeating herself. She becomes narrative itself, and small stories begin writing themselves everywhere: "Every person is both author and protagonist."
- Marlow Thorne, year 34X, at a crossroads where five roads meet. His last contract is signed by everyone who will ever mean a promise. He presses his palm to it and is absorbed like ink into blotting paper, becoming "the guarantee that honor is possible".
- Sampo is given one line: "Sampo's thread was shorter than most, he burned bright and fast."
- Remi is called home, and the exchange about him is the strangest thing in the chapter. See below.
The Sins are simply murdered
No dissolution, no principle. Ordinary violence, and Blook attends each one.
| Who | How |
|---|---|
| Sienna Blackwood | Crushed under the collapsed keystone of Saint Matthias Cathedral, which "had grown tired of defying gravity" |
| Calista Voss | Stabbed backstage by the wife of a man she had enthralled, who waited with a carving knife |
| Mirelle and Draken | Bound with their own silk curtain rope in the Meridian's wine cellar, killed with frenzied rather than professional cuts |
| Emery Hart | Stabbed with a scalpel from his own kit, and refuses to treat himself |
| Velvet Crane | Bleeding out between two tenement buildings |
| Louch Ashford | Suicide. A .38 revolver, in his own office, "defiant to the very end" |
Blook stays with each of them, closes their eyes, and arranges their bodies. The asymmetry is the point: the Virtues become part of how the world works, and the Sins get knives in alleys.
Two deaths worth quoting
Emery Hart dies unrepentant, and corrects Blook on the way out:
BLK: Coming to terms with your end isn't something I predicted of you, Fool of Denial. EMR: Don't flatter me with such titles, and I ain't coming to terms with anything. There isn't a slither of regret in this dying body of mine.
Velvet Crane breaks the chronicler:
VLT: You're the one person in this world I don't envy. Not even a bit. Your eyes tell stories of suffering beyond anything we've ever felt. ... VLT: Thank you for being with me, and not leaving me alone to die. BLK: It's my responsibility, so don't take it perso- VLT: I love you, ghosty. I really, truly do.
What happened to the world
Thirteen souls left, "thirteen concentrated points of divine essence", and their absence left "spaces deliberately emptied, like a master sculptor removing clay to reveal the form underneath" (ch. 22).
Then the essence redistributed, on the first day of what the calendars would call the New Era. Not evenly: "equilibrium is not equality. The essence didn't divide evenly among all souls, instead, it flowed to where it was needed."
Everyone felt it at once, "a sudden expansion, like taking the first breath after nearly drowning". A woman reached for a fallen clothespin across a yard and had it in her hand without moving.
The world names it the Great Awakening
Ch. 22 never gives the day a name. It says only "what the calendars would later mark as the first day of a New Era".
Ch. 23 supplies the name the world settled on, and uses it three times as established vocabulary: the Great Awakening. It dates the whole of Acts 2 and 3 from it, "three centuries after the Great Awakening", and it describes the places the change never reached as "where the Great Awakening's light had never fully reached".
That is the same root as the Awakened, the word Act 1 already used for a person whose gift had surfaced. The event takes the name of the condition, three hundred years after the fact.
This is where extracts come from, and where the split between humans and monsterkind begins. See ../systems/species-asymmetry.md, which records a contradiction between this chapter and the author's later notes.
The one who was called home
Ch. 20 ends on Remi, and on an exchange that is never explained:
GBR: I'm surprised you'd stay by a mortals' side on their deathbed. BLK: He's no mortal, Gabriel. GBR: I know that, after all, you did choose him.
[ It's time to go home, Remi. ]
Blook chose Remi, which is not how any of the other thirteen were found, and Remi is not mortal, which nothing in ch. 17 suggested.
Open questions
- What Remi is, and what Blook choosing him means.
- Why the Virtues transcend and the Sins are stabbed.
- Whether the fourteenth, Compassion, is still unborn after this. Ch. 21 says the absence of compassion is "not from death itself, but because this particular world isn't yet worthy of divine mercy".