Coldfire Reread 2021: Black Sun Rising - Chapter 12

[alice_montrose]

Welcome to chapter 12 - and if you thought the previous chapters were info dump, well guess again. Fae info, evolution on Erna (with focus on rakh evolution), a detailed explanation from Ciani on how adepts See (and not just that)... and Senzei getting dumped to end it all. XD

Plot summary
Damien and Senzei visit the cathedral's archive, and Damien explains the evolution of the rakh - the part he knows about, anyway. They start plotting how to get into the rakhlands. Ciani despairs over the loss of her adeptitude, but Damien convinces her that they need to go together. And when Senzei tells his fiancée that he's going with them, Allesha breaks up with him - though more because of his obsession with the fae than because of the journey.

Quotes

• Damien shook his head. "No. Before that. As near as I can tell, it started right after the Sacrifice. But when Rakhi declared that this species was man's Erna equivalent - that but for man's presence, the species would have developed advanced intelligence and complex dexterity and eventually taken to the stars - the pace picked up alarmingly. Such is the power of the popular imagination."


• "Of course, now we understand what happened. Now we know that evolution is a very different process here than it was on Earth. Here, if trees grow taller, the next gaffi calves are born with longer necks. If lakes dry up, the offspring of underwater creatures are born with rudimentary lungs. Their need affects their DNA, in precise and perfect balance. To us, it seems wholly natural; several adepts have even managed to Work the process, giving us our un-Earth species. But we understand this all now, after centuries of observation. Imagine what it must have meant for our ancestors, to see this happening before their eyes!"


• "Wholesale slaughter of an innocent species. And the unwitting creation of a host of demons, as byproducts of man's most murderous instincts. All feeding on his hatred, all savoring his intolerance. Is it any wonder that human society nearly devolved into total chaos? That the rigid social patterns of the Revivalist movement seemed to be man's only hope of maintaining order?"


• "You don't understand," she whispered. "You can't possibly understand." A tear gathered under her lashes, but lacked the substance to free itself; her body was too dehydrated to spare that much fluid. "What it's like to live with the fae. Like adepts do. Zen thinks it's like a constant Seeing, but it's not that at all." Her brow furrowed as she struggled for words. "It's everywhere. In everything. There are so many different kinds that I don't even have names for them all, some so fleeting that they're just a spark out of the corner of your eye - a flash of light, of power - and then they're gone, before you can focus on them. And the currents flow through it all - everything! - not just around it, like he Sees, but permeating every substance on this planet, living and unliving, solid and illusory. Sometimes you'll be looking at the sky and the tidal-fae will flux for an instant and there it is - like a flaw in a crystal that suddenly catches the light, a spectrum of living color that's gone before you can even draw a breath. And there's music, too, so beautiful that it hurts just to listen to. Everywhere you look, everything you touch, it's all permeated with living fae - all in a constant state of flux, changing hourly as the different tides course through it. And the result is a world so rich, so wonderful, that it makes you shiver just to live in it ..." She drew in a shaky breath. "Do you understand? When I touch a stone, what I feel isn't hard rock - I feel everything that stone has been, everything it might become, I feel how it channels the earth-fae and how it interacts with the tidal fae and how the power of the sun will affect it, and what it will be when true night falls ... do you understand, Damien? That bit of rock is alive alive - everything is alive to us, even the air we breathe - only now-" She coughed raggedly, and he could hear the tears come into her voice. "Don't you see? That's what they took! It's all dead now. I look around, and all I see are corpses. A universe of corpses. Like everything I see is sculpted out of rotting meat ... except it's not even rotting; there's life in corruption, you know, even carrion has its own special music ... and here there's nothing. Nothing! I touch this bed -" and she grasped the bedframe with her free hand, and squeezed it until her knuckles were white with the pressure, "- and all I feel ... gods, there's no life in it ... can you understand? It wasn't me they drained, it was the whole of my world!"


• "Thus speaks the guardian of peace."
  "There's nothing in my Order's charter about peace. Or in the Church's Manifesto, for that matter. That's post-war PR."


• "I mean the fae, Zen. I mean your hunger for something you can never have. Don't you think I see how it eats at you? Don't you think I can feel it in you every time I'm with you? Every time we touch? Feel it in you every time we make love - how you wish it could be more, how you wish you could experience it on all those different levels - don't you think I can sense your frustration? Your distraction?"

No thoughts this time, because 1) it was that kind of a day, and 2) I'd like to hear from you all regarding all of this. I'll add my thoughts in the comments as well, as soon as I read the chapter with a fresh mind tomorrow morning and try to arrange them all in a coherent text.

Edit: Please read rekishi's very well-written comment on evolution below, it's fascinating and she deserves all the kudos and replies!

Link to the previous discussion post (imported from LiveJournal).

On Monday we conclude Book 1, with chapters 13 and 14.

Comments

[rekishi]

"There's nothing in my Order's charter about peace. Or in the Church's Manifesto, for that matter. That's post-war PR."

Can we talk about this? Are we talking about Gannon's wars or are we talking about the Holy Crusade against the Forest?

Damien's Order (Gerald's order) is older than the wars, so how much was added to the holy books post-wars? And by whose hand?

[alice_montrose]

Can we talk about this?

We definitely can. And I think we are talking in general, if as I suspect the Order's charter was drafted by Gerald and there were not many alterations done to it over the centuries.

And if the Revival was the response to pulling them out of the dark ages, as it were, they would have needed warriors strong in the faith. It stands to reason that tradition would have been maintained, and likely the knights would have fought in the Holy Crusade.

But overall, if the purpose of the Church is to transform Erna on such a deep level that the fae no longer reacts to humans, then there's a reason there's nothing about peace. Because sorcerors and those of other faiths would not give up Working easily, would they? "Gods" would fight this, too. It would be messy.

My best guess, the post-war PR is post Holy Crusade, when they got their asses handed to them. Because, to quote Damien from an earlier chapter:
The Church once tried to master it by massive applications of faith - that was the last of the Great Wars, as I’m sure you know - but all it did was give them back their nightmares, with a dark religious gloss. Such power prefers the guarded secrets of the unconscious to the preferences of our conscious will.

[prettyarbitrary]

Much later, Jenseny is going to have a vision of the young knight who first carried Damien's Fire. And as I remember, he is a member of Damien's Order. So that was the Crusade against the Forest.

That also seems to be when Damien's Order died out in the east--and what killed them all.

(That young man tells Jenseny, "Some things are worth dying for" and it wasn't until this reread that I realized how much he paralleled Damien.)

[trobadora]

I thought it referred to the crusade against the Forest.