The narrator

Gabriel and Lucifer did not kill Vazroth. They made him tell the story.

The sentence

After the fight in ch. 4 they bound him rather than destroying him, stripped his power, and put him in "the only prison strong enough", which Gabriel names as the one Blook once wielded: a narrator (ch. 5).

GBR: Eternal. Endless. A punishment fitting of his hunger for control. LCF: Now he's a voice. Just a voice destined to one day narrate a story he chooses.

A being whose whole appetite was control is sentenced to describe events he cannot touch. It is a punishment built out of his own character.

Where he is on the page

Every chapter in the saga closes with a bracketed line. The archive counted them across all 329, and there are no exceptions. The markup varies and a few run to more than one line, which is recorded in the-typography.md.

Who speaks the bracket is a separate question from what the bracket is. This entry used to answer it too quickly, from a table that listed nine of the twenty-three brackets in the Prologue and Act 1. The complete set is below, because the lines the old table left out are the ones that identify the speaker.

Ch. 0 to ch. 5 describe the chapter they close. Ch. 6 is the turn, and the turn is a name: Blooky. From there the voice talks to Blook, and about the people standing next to him, and it stops describing the story at all.

The Act 1 brackets are not Vazroth

This entry used to say they are. The complete table does not support it.

Four lines identify the speaker, and all four were missing from the old table.

• Ch. 6 calls Blook "Blooky". The only other speaker who uses that name is the third voice, in ch. 47: "It's just me so don't be so hard on yourself, Blooky."
• Ch. 10 asks for coffee. The third voice narrates ch. 53 "with a cup of coffee in my hand", and asks in ch. 52, "Can you please drink the coffee normally, Illia?"
• Ch. 19 remarks on Gabriel. The third voice says in ch. 53, "I tried to ask Gabriel but all he gives me is a warm smile."
• Ch. 20 sends Remi home. The third voice speaks to Remi in ch. 53 and gets an answer back in italics.

Coffee, Gabriel, Remi, and the name Blooky are the four markers of the third voice, and all four are already in Act 1. The voice in these brackets is the one that takes the whole of ch. 53, and it is in the heavens the entire time.

Two more lines fit nothing else. "My back hurts from all this labor" (ch. 8) belongs to something with a back. "Do ghosts even eat anything?" (ch. 16) is asked by somebody who is not a ghost and does not know.

Ch. 21 is the one that does not fit, and the archive says so rather than smoothing it. Ch. 21 is an entry written by Blook's future self to his past self. "You sound really cool, future me" is what a past self answers, which puts Blook himself in the brackets for one line. Either the brackets change hands inside the volume, or the speaker is quoting. Nothing settles it.

Ch. 22 is ambiguous, and the archive does not resolve it

The time finally comes for me to be the narrator, good ol' Vazzy.

Two readings. The text supports both.

Vazroth is addressed. Every other trailing name in the brackets is a vocative, without exception: Blooky in ch. 6 and ch. 47, Gabriel in ch. 19, Remi in ch. 20, Jade in ch. 28, Icarus in ch. 41, Akumu in ch. 46, Illia in ch. 52. On that pattern the speaker turns to Vazroth to say that the speaker's own turn has come.

Vazroth speaks. Ch. 5 sentences him to become "a voice. Just a voice destined to one day narrate a story he chooses." Ch. 22 would be that day, and "good ol' Vazzy" would be him naming himself on the way in. Ch. 53 confirms he narrates at some point, because the third voice complains that Blook rates "that ugly Vazroth" the better narrator.

What ch. 22 itself says. The chapter's own prose has Blook stand down, in plain words, before the bracket speaks:

The narrative passes now to younger voices, fresher perspectives, souls who will shape this transformed world with their hopes and fears and dreams. I've done my part.

So a hand-over is certain. Only the recipient is not.

The archive records both readings and picks neither. What is settled is the negative: the brackets before ch. 22 are not Vazroth's, because ch. 22 is the first place the narration is claimed by anybody at all.

It is not one voice after Act 1

From Acts 2 and 3 the brackets are a commentary track with at least three speakers, and they talk to each other.

All thirty-two are below. The archive checked every one.

Akumu, addressing its agents and its prey. Fourteen of the thirty-two, and the register never varies: it gives orders, it gloats, and it names people by what it intends to do to them.

"Rabbit" is Matta, who has rabbit ears. Akumu takes the name from Salazar, who uses it at her through ch. 32 to ch. 34. The bracket is repeating its own agent's insult.

Blook, who names himself twice and signs the volume:

The third voice, warm, on first-name terms with everybody, and the same one that takes ch. 53 and speaks the Act 1 brackets. It watches the chapter from outside it:

Ch. 53 is where this voice arrives in full, and the bracket under it is "You can faintly see the suns' wings", which is what Icarus becomes in that chapter. It knew.

A fourth register: the chapter's own protagonist

Six brackets in Acts 2 and 3 are not a watcher at all. They are the point of view character of that chapter, speaking one line to somebody inside it, after the chapter has closed.

Each one is verified against the chapter it closes. Ch. 43 is Kael's, and Tara is named in it as "my sister". Ch. 44 is Matta's, and "rabbit" is what Salazar and then Akumu call her. Ch. 51 is Nilah's, and she is fighting her way toward Icarus when it ends.

Matta's is a reply. Akumu taunts her in ch. 32 and ch. 33 from the margin. Twelve chapters later she answers from the same place. The brackets are not a commentary track laid over the story. They are inside it, and the characters can reach them.

That also settles what the brackets are as a form. Blook's future self writes ch. 21 into a journal, and ch. 47 has one voice reassuring another by name. A margin that Akumu, Blook, a watcher, and six protagonists all write in is a shared page, not one narrator's aside.

The third voice takes the chapter

Ch. 53 opens in that voice, at length, and it is the most informative passage about the narration in the saga so far.

I understand how small mortals look to the heavens, as I sit here watching from above with a cup of coffee in my hand. But are their actions futile? Quite the opposite. I believe in the importance of everything, no matter how small. Isn't that right, Remi?

Mhm.

[...] I tried to ask Gabriel but all he gives me is a warm smile. Lucifer is always busy, whilst the others up here don't know much. I want to know about myself, oh well, too bad. Blook told me not to talk about myself a lot when I'm narrating. Can't believe he said that ugly Vazroth is better at narrating than I am.

What this establishes:

• The speaker is in the heavens, with access to Gabriel and Lucifer, and is not either of them.
• Remi is there, answering in italics, and it is the same Remi Blook chose and called no mortal in ch. 20.
• Blook assigns the narration. He told this one not to talk about itself, and he rates Vazroth the better narrator, which means narrating is a role handed out rather than a sentence served alone.
• The speaker does not know what it is, and nobody up there will say.

The ch. 48 bracket, "I'm so excited for my date with Remi!", is the same speaker.

Acts 4 and 5 are Illia's, and she says so

Ch. 56 is her chapter, told in the first person, and it ends by taking the job.

Thank you, Blook, for showing me my role [...] I will return the favor by temporarily relieving you of your duty, taking up the brush you've carried for so long, adding my own artistic perspective to the grand narrative. I'll narrate the fables of these five.

Ch. 55, the chapter before it, is Blook's. He is "beyond the veil of mortality" with Remi beside him. So the hand-over happens on the page, between two consecutive chapters, from one named narrator to another.

The brackets carry her signature the whole way. Six of the forty-seven name the speaker as an artist:

Ch. 101 closes the volume by handing the duty back.

Not all of Acts 4 and 5's brackets are hers. Ch. 68, "Show them that you're a remnant of me - arise", belongs to whatever is under Mount Ebott. Ch. 72, "Mama's proud of you, little ice prince", is Neru's mother. Ch. 79, "Despite our distance, I was always fond of you, rabbit", is not hers either, and this entry used to give it to Salazar on the strength of the word "rabbit".

Three characters use that word for her. Salazar, throughout ch. 32 to ch. 34, as a taunt. Magistrate Korren, in ch. 44 and ch. 50, as condescension. And Aquila, in ch. 76, saying goodbye at the edge of the heavens: "Good luck, rabbit. Try not to break the universe on your way out." The narration marks that one as "warm with something that might have been affection".

So the word does not identify the speaker. Distance and fondness both fit Aquila, who is three chapters away rather than forty-five and is the only one of the three who felt any. The entry no longer names a speaker for it.

So the same shared margin as Acts 2 and 3, with a different hand holding the pen.

Ch. 81 to ch. 88 are a conversation, and none of it is Illia

The longest unbroken run of brackets in one voice anywhere in the saga, and it belongs to Fenris. The volume's narrator hands him her own margin for eight chapters and does not take it back until his arc ends.

Two of them answer things said in the chapters themselves.

Ch. 85's body ends with Milo telling him "I'll always be proud of you". Ch. 86's bracket is the reply, one chapter later, and it is bitter.

Ch. 87's bracket announces ch. 88. He says he will remember one last time, and ch. 88 is the remembering, in the first person, from under the same bridge.

Then ch. 89 hands the margin back: "Your portrait is quite the spectacle."

Acts 4 and 5 also rotate the first person

Illia takes the narration in ch. 56 and keeps it, but not exclusively.

Ch. 83 changes hands in the middle of itself. It opens in third person on Fenris hunting through the city and switches, with no section break, into Vincent Caruso's first person: "I adjusted my silk tie". The rest of the chapter is the hunt told from inside the prey, and Fenris is never described again in it.

Ch. 88 is Fenris's own, in the first person throughout.

Ch. 79 and ch. 80 are Illia's, also first person, which is what makes the volume's method visible: the painter narrating her subjects, and twice putting the pen down so a subject can speak.

Ch. 100 is Blook's, and the archive had it nowhere. He identifies himself in the second paragraph, in the first person, in the middle of the volume that took the job off him:

And me, Blook, your humble fedora-wearing ghost, hovered above it all, watching.

So the hand-over at ch. 56 is not clean. He takes one chapter back for the dedication of the Hall of Heroes, surveys each of the six survivors in turn, and gives the pen to Illia again for ch. 101, where she signs off.

It also explains why ch. 100 has an outside view of Illia at all. The chapter's narrator is the only other person in the saga who can watch her work and read what it costs, and he says so: "Every brushstroke had cost him something." See ../characters/illia.md for the pronoun slip in that same passage.

Ch. 101 keeps him, and then puts him in the room. The volume's last chapter opens in the same first person, watching seven people drink coffee: "I hovered nearby, brim low over my eyes, thinking this is what legends look like when the wars are done."

The brim is the tell, and it is the same one ch. 100 used. Then the chapter ends with a figure walking out of the dark "with a fedora tilted just so", who says "Evening, legends", and whom Illia vouches for.

So the narrator of ch. 101 arrives in ch. 101. That is consistent with what he can do rather than a mistake: he has been able to stand in a room unnoticed since ch. 8, where Sienna Blackwood never registers him at all. He watches the table unseen, narrates it, and then chooses to be seen.

The bracket is still Illia's, and it is the hand-back: "This was nice, but this artist has duty to attend to." So the volume's final two chapters are narrated by the ghost and signed by the painter, which is the arrangement ch. 55 and ch. 56 set up, running in both directions at once.

Act 6 opens in his voice too

Ch. 102 begins in the first person, drifting, and the speaker is Blook again:

I have drifted through many seasons since last I lingered here. The valley has changed, though the stone remembers.

He describes the finished Hall of Heroes, the children reciting verses about people they never met, and the Knights as "voices still loud in the dark". Then he says the next story is starting, and the chapter switches to third person on Alexander and never comes back.

So he holds the seam between volumes at both ends: ch. 100 and ch. 101 close Acts 4 and 5 in his voice, and ch. 102 opens Act 6 in it.

That is three mid-chapter narrator switches now on record, and they are the saga's least advertised habit:

Ch. 134 is the related case in the other direction, holding two voices apart for a whole chapter by styling one of them. See the-typography.md.

The journal frame

Ch. 47 is titled "Journal Entry". Ch. 54 closes the volume with "Signed Blook, the friendly ghost with a journal."

Blook was handed a journal written by his own future self in ch. 19, and ch. 21 is explicitly an entry from it, addressed to "my past self, my newer incarnation", with tear stains on the pages.

So the most economical reading is that the brackets are marginalia, written into a journal that more than one hand has reached, rather than a single narrator's aside. Whether Vazroth's sentence makes him the book itself is not stated anywhere read so far.

The cipher

Two brackets and one line of prose are written in a substituted alphabet. It is a real cipher and it decodes cleanly.

• ch. 40, in the prose: Icarus looks at "the ꀘ꒐ꋊꍌ on his throne", which is KING.
• ch. 40, in the bracket: "His mind is already made up. ꀘ꒐꒒꒒ ꁝ꒐ꂵ" is KILL HIM.
• ch. 41, in the bracket: "Bring them all to ꂵꏂ" is ME.

All three are Akumu's, and all three are the moment it stops observing and starts giving orders. The glyphs appear nowhere else in the archive.

Blook resigns the role, out loud, to the reader

Ch. 236 is the only place in the saga where the narration addresses its audience directly and admits it is doing so.

Blook has been talking to nobody for the whole volume. Ch. 191 has him do it and then dismiss himself: "Nobody's listening. That's a dumb thing to do." Ch. 236 takes it back:

BLK: I don't know if anyone's ever really been there. On the other end of this. I told myself for a long time that no one was, because believing that made it easier to keep talking without feeling foolish about it.

BLK: I think what matters is that I needed somewhere to put all of this, and you, whoever or whatever you are, became that place, whether or not you ever actually received any of it.

Then he resigns:

BLK: I'm not going to be the one telling this story anymore. After this. I wanted to say that directly, instead of just disappearing the way these things sometimes do. I wanted whoever has been listening, if anyone has, to know that the silence afterward isn't abandonment. It's just an ending. The kind I never let myself have before.

BLK: Thank you, I think. For whatever this was. Whether you were ever actually there or not.

Two things follow from this and both matter for the rest of the saga.

1. Blook was a narrator, not only a commenter. The brackets attributed to him in Acts 2 and 3 are one register. Ch. 236 says he has been carrying the telling itself.

2. Act 11 onward has a different narrator. Ch. 238 opens the four hundred and seventeen year jump in a voice that does not identify itself, and by ch. 236 Blook has already said it will not be him. Whoever narrates Arthur's story is a question the saga has now explicitly posed rather than left implicit.

Note that Vazroth's sentence in ch. 5 was to become a narrator, and Gabriel names the prison as "the one Blook once wielded". Ch. 236 has Blook hand that same thing back, to Gabriel, by choice. The symmetry is on the page. What it means is not.

Gabriel speaks to the reader once

Ch. 237, after Blook has already gone under and before he wakes, the narration changes hands mid-chapter, in italics, and says so:

GBR: Before he wakes, allow me a moment with you directly. I do not often speak this way, and I suspect I will not again, but I felt this once deserved an exception.

What follows is addressed to whoever is reading:

I hope, whoever you are, wherever you have been reading this from, that you enjoyed his voice across all the time he carried it. He worried, more than he ever let on, that no one was listening. [...] knowing he was heard would have meant more to him than he had the courage to ask for outright.

I would ask, if you are willing, that you hold a small measure of gratitude for him. Not for the story he told [...] For the courage it took to finally ask for an ending after refusing himself one.

He was a dear friend to me, in whatever capacity a being like myself is permitted friends.

Thank him, if you can find a way to. I do not think he will ever know it. But I believe, somehow, it will still matter.

So the saga has three named voices that have held the narration directly: Vazroth under sentence, Blook by role, and Gabriel once, for one passage, by exception.

Why it matters

Whoever is speaking, the account is not neutral. Act 1 is told by Blook in the first person, with an unidentified voice in the margins that knows him, knows the gods, and will not say what it is. Acts 2 and 3 have the current antagonist writing in those same margins, in cipher, telling somebody to kill somebody.

Open questions

• Who the third voice is. It sits in the heavens with Remi, drinks coffee, takes instruction from Blook, and cannot find out its own nature from Gabriel or Lucifer. That last detail is the striking one: the fourteenth of the Fourteen, the Virtue of Compassion, was never found because she had not chosen to manifest yet. It is present from ch. 6, which means it is watching for the whole hunt.
• Whether Vazroth speaks any bracket at all, or whether ch. 22 is somebody else telling him his sentence is being served by another.
• Who "future me" is in ch. 21's line, and who has the date with Remi in ch. 48.
• Whether the narration is ever wrong, and whether the story shows it.
• Whether Vazroth's appearances in Acts 7 and 8 are the bound voice or something that got out.
• Who narrates from ch. 238 onward. Blook resigns in ch. 236 and Act 11 begins in an unattributed voice.