Coldfire Reread 2021: Black Sun Rising - Chapters 25, 26 and 27

[alice_montrose]

Sorry for the delay on this. I am considering moving posts to Sunday morning, as Saturdays seem to get away from me. We'll see.

Without further ad, let us all properly meet our anti-hero, Gerald Tarrant, Neocount of Merentha, Knight of the Realm, Premier of the Order of the Golden Flame, Prophet of the Law, Hunter, Master of the Forest, undead smartass extraordinaire. No wonder Damien is furious!

Plot summary

Chapter 25
Damien and Senzei are taken to the Keep, the former seething with anger, the second too weak to really care. They are treated to the scenic view that is the Hunter’s Keep – something that looks very familiar to Damien .The familiarity soon gets worse when the real identity of the Hunter is revealed, who turns out to be Gerald Tarrant and at the same time the Prophet of the Law. Who should have been dead for nine centuries. More snark between Damien and the Hunter follows, as well as fixing Senzei with coldfire and a reunion with Ciani. Lots of questions are asked, some of them are even answered, and Damien gains a travel companion he’d rather not have. But as Tarrant explains – he’s not going to get a choice about it, so he’d better deal with it.

Chapter 26
The mind-eating demons hunker down for an ambush .Which goes wrong because Tarrant, contingency planner that he is, has made preparations and sent some more expendable travelers along the intended route first.

Chapter 27
Tarrant is faced with the minor inconvenience of having to take a slightly different way to avoid awkward questions about a few dead bodies, and with the realization that he is not quite certain what to think about what he got himself into.

Quotes

• If the current had been that bad there, then Working it this close to the center of the whirlpool would be tantamount to suicide.
  I’d do it, Damien thought grimly. If I thought I could Heal him before it got me, I’d do it in a second.


• “A supporter? My God, he wrote half our bible. More than half! His signature is on nearly every holy book we have. The dream that we serve is his, Zen. His!”
  Senzei looked confused. “What about your Prophet?”
  "He is the Prophet. Don’t you understand? That was the name that they gave to him, when...” He shut his eyes; a shiver ran through his frame. “A name for the first part of his life. The time when he served God and man, and designed a faith that he believed could tame the fae, if only humanity would accept it. How could we follow in his footsteps without recognizing the source of our inspiration? But the Church didn’t dare use his name, because that might have invoked something of his spirit. They struck it from the books. And after... after...”
  He turned away. He didn’t want Senzei to see the tears that were coming. He might misread their source, assuming weakness - when in fact they were tears of rage. “He was an adept,” he whispered hoarsely. “One of the first. And the premier knight of my Order. One day he... snapped. We don’t know what caused it. We’re not even sure exactly what happened. But those who searched through Merentha Castle after his disappearance found the remains of his family, gruesomely slaughtered. Apparently he... vivisected his wife. His children.” He turned back to Senzei. “You have to understand,” he whispered urgently. “In our tradition, there is no greater evil. Because he was, before he fell, all that we venerate. All that we strive to become. And then he threw it all away! In an act of such brutal inhumanity that there could be no question that he had damned his soul forever...”


• “It’s been almost ten centuries, Zen. Ten centuries! How can a human being live that long?”
  “Maybe,” the sorcerer said nervously, “by becoming something that’s no longer human.”


• Hands shaking, thoughts reeling, he somehow managed to find his voice. “You vulking bastard...”
  Gerald Tarrant chuckled. “The soul of courtesy, as always. You surprise me, priest. I would think that the premier of your Order deserved more respect.”


• “You’re no servant of the Church!”
  “Oh, I am that. More than you could possibly understand.”


• “You will trust me, priest.” His voice was a mere whisper, but the power behind it was deafening. Ripples of earth-fae carried the words deep into Damien’s brain, adhered their meaning to his flesh. “Not because you want to. Or because it comes easily to you. Because you have no choice.”


• “He was furious with you. For entering the Forest. Furious because he would now have to deal with you, instead of just settling things with me. Any entanglement with the living is a threat to him... as if it somehow could cost him his life, I don’t understand it exactly. He blames you for that.”
  Damien’s eyes narrowed. “That’s fair enough. I blame him for a lot.”


• “It’s the glue that holds it all together for him. The last living fragment of his human identity. If he lets that go... he’ll be no more than a mindless demon. Dead, to all intents and purposes. A tool of your hell, without any will of his own.”
  “Not a pretty concept.”
  “He’s very proud, and very determined. His will to live is so strong that every other force in his life, every other concern, is subordinated to it. That’s what’s kept him alive all these years.” She shuddered. “If he didn’t feel that the question of honor was so linked to his personal survival-”
  “Then we would all be dead,” he finished for her. “That explains a lot. What I don’t understand is that he’s returned the memories to you - along with a few of his own, I gather - and now we’re all here together, restored as a group. He’s undone the damage he caused. So why is it so necessary for him to come along? How does Revivalist honor play a part in that?”
  Her eyes were wide, her voice solemn. “He promised someone,” she whispered. “Just that. He promised someone he would never hurt me... and then he did. He betrayed himself. The force of his self-hatred...” She looked away. “You can’t imagine it,” she breathed. “But I remember it, as though it were my own. And... there aren’t words...” She clutched herself, as though by doing so she could keep his memories from coming to her. “He perceives himself as balanced on a very fine line, with death on both sides of him. And if at any moment he fails to choose the course that will maintain his balance-”
  “He dies,” Damien muttered.
  “Or worse,” she told him. “There are far, far worse things than mere death that lie in wait for him now.”


• "Imagine a whole world like that. A world of unalterable physical laws, where the will of the living has no power over inanimate objects. A world in which the same experiment, performed at a thousand different sites by a thousand different men, would have exactly the same result each time. That is our heritage, Reverend Vryce. Which this world denied us.”
  He looked at the telescope and tried to envision a world such as the Hunter described. And at last could only mutter, “I can’t imagine it.”
  “Nor I. After years of trying. The magnitude of it staggers the imagination. That a whole planet could be so utterly unresponsive to life... and yet life as we know it evolved on its surface.”


• He felt a tremor deep within himself, as if some part of the human self he had buried had trickled through to the surface. Fear? Anticipation? Dread? He had lived for so long within the Forest’s hospitable confines that he could no longer remember what it was like to be afraid. Somewhere along the line he had lost that, too, as if fear and love and compassion and paternal devotion had all been a package deal, discarded together in that first red sacrifice which took him from one life to another.
  And if he feared, was there something that would feed on that? As he fed on the fear of others - that last delicious moment when the human mind abandoned all hope and the defenses of the soul came crashing down? Man had arrived on this planet little more than a millennium ago, and already there were myriad creatures that relied on him for sustenance; why should the food chain stop there?

Thoughts

• Oh, all the thoughts! Chapter 25 is a symphony's high point, where all the notes converge into one masterpiece. Though thoroughly spoiled by this point, I still enjoy watching "the reveal" unfold, little by little. Oh, His Excellency. Oh, he's the Neocount. He's the Prophet. And of course he's Gerald Tarrant, of course it was him all along, and of course he'll be going into the rakhlands. He does not like to, but he has to in order to redeem his honour. And now we know the value of his word. And of course he will plant the explanation in Ciani's brain with impunity, because he would not speak of such things aloud.


• Damien... poor Damien, so conflicted. He is thoroughly enraged at this point, and with good reason. Especially when he realizes that, well, his idol is not only set on a path worse than death, but he's right there and alive and the focus of Damien's fury. Although I think at this point Damien is still in the "anger and disappointment" stages. And then he finally gives up an lets Gerald not heal Senzei, and that costs him. But I think that, even then, in a small corner of his unconsciousness, a small fanboy is very excited. And hey, he finally gets to use the tool he must.


• Zen is out for most of it, but he still manages to give us one of the best quotes in this chapter.


• Ciani is back, and now "improved" with flashes of the Hunter's memories. Because yeah, that will do her a great deal of good. But she seems to have her curiosity back, which is always a plus.


• The telescope and the circle where there is no fae. I mean, Gerald has done many things and will continue to do them, but that circle speaks of his obsession, and his final goal, and the fact that even he does not fully understand how to live in a world where his will no longer makes things happen. And yet he pursues this dream, and the Earth science lost to humanity.


• Gerald puts forth the theory that theirs attackers are not fae constructs, but something else. And that they are also controlled by a higher evil. (I mean, he would know...)


• The chapter where the creatures feed on our party is... eerie. The "priest's" memories were so well described when they were being devoured. Were those people actually the counterparts of Zen and Damien,
  I wonder? Did Gerald find a sorceror and a priest, to make it all more convincing?


• Finally, finally, we get Gerald POV again. He is worried, though, about the Forest in his absence. And he is uncertain what he feels about leaving. "Fear? Anticipation? Dread?". It is the uncertainty of a new journey, of something clearly out of the ordinary for him. And it all ends on a note of evolutionary theory - for the damned.

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

On Tuesday, we look back on Book Two, as we prepare for the third act.

Comments

[lunabee34]

That moment with the telescope is the one where it really hit me what it would be like to live in their society. That was a really powerful moment.

I mean, I suppose that ultimately their magic takes the place of our tech in that not everyone on earth is developing the skills to grind the lens of a telescope, for example. Technological and scientific knowledge/skills are the purview of a few just like magic is the purview of a few. But I feel like there's this Anybody Could aspect that gets stripped away on Erna (even if Everybody Doesn't is always the default even in a world without fae). I have no idea if any of that made sense. LOL

[prettyarbitrary]

Yeah, it's such a mindbending moment! It's as difficult to fully imagine all the implications and consequences of living on their world as it must be for them to imagine ours.

Once they get it, I wonder if they'll find it to be better or worse than what they had...

[lunabee34]

Probably both better *and* worse, I suspect.

[rekishi]

“The same,” he managed. “It’s still ... the same.” The truth was almost too fantastic. “It’s not a farseer.”

[...]

"Imagine a whole world like that. A world of unalterable physical laws, where the will of the living has no power over inanimate objects. A world in which the same experiment, performed at a thousand different sites by a thousand different men, would have exactly the same result each time. That is our heritage, Reverend Vryce. Which this world denied us.”

Every single time I read BSR this makes me go "!!!!!!!!!!!"

god, this is such worldview altering moment for both Damien and the reader.

there are no laws of nature on Erna. or at least not as we know them. the fact that they have gravity is probably only due to the gravitational pull of the larger universe, and even then we could possibly consider that someone has overcome them maybe as is born up up up by the fae.

nothing works the way as we know it. evolution, fine, Lamarck I can get behind. do people on Erna have glasses? do they need glasses? does everyone know how glasses work and that's why they do??

argh.

also: how many people besides Gerald understand this? does anyone else? Damien can maybe sort of wrap his head around it with the evidence in front of him but...


(side question: what does a farseeer then actually do? does it show you what you want to see?)

[lunabee34]

That's an interesting question. I guess it would show you what you wanted to see. So then could you trust that what you were seeing was actually there?

[prettyarbitrary]

Hhhhhhhhhhhhh THIS CHAPTER <3

I love Tarrant showing off his sciencing setup. He spends hundreds of years avoiding humanity, and then a few show up despite his best efforts and he's like, "...I GOTTA NERD OUT."

"Premiere of the Order of the Golden Flame" gets me every time. The chapter is so intense, but a corner of my brain always laughs at poor Damien's misfortune. THAT'S YOUR BOSS.

I don't know why it always throws me so much to realize that Tarrant made himself immortal and then promptly built himself a cozy magic fortress and set things up so that he would never ever face danger. I mean. That's the logical thing to do, if you've gone to those lengths to avoid dying! But it catches me off guard every time for some reason. I guess somehow he feels like an expeditionary sort of guy to me? Or maybe it's just that I always expect the heroes of stories to be bigger and braver and more daring than me, but aside from the murder and terrorizing, Tarrant's kind of a nerdy homebody and I can identify with that.

Edit to add: You know there's zero reason not to move this to Sundays. :D Nobody's pinning their weekly schedule around the BSR post dropping on Saturdays instead of Sundays.

[rekishi]

I said it before but...Gerald's brain. I adore and fear it equally.

I'm not actually surprised he shut himself away upon becoming immortal. It's exactly what I would do. Everyone should just leave him in peace to do his experiments, thanks. The only one that really doesn't fit is Amoril.

[prettyarbitrary]

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who's kind of "WTF Amoril?"

Tarrant seems so respectful of him in this book? And when he and Damien complete their bond, he says Amoril's the only one he's done this with before? WHY?

[prettyarbitrary]

And again, thinking about Ciani: I keep wondering how much she changes throughout this story. Damien speculates that with Tarrant's memories and his influence on her in terms of the fae, she's a different woman than she started. But we never really see enough of who she was to know if that's true...and then she's just been through so much by the end of the story, it's difficult again to say whether any of her changes are due to Tarrant or just due to her experiences.

I really wish we'd gotten more of her. Damien and Tarrant hold my heart, but I really really like all we see of her and the hints we get about what we aren't getting to see, and I just wish we'd gotten more glimpses of her inner world.

[rekishi]

I’d do it, Damien thought grimly. If I thought I could Heal him before it got me, I’d do it in a second.

And he will do exactly this just a few years later, even if it's not for Zen but for the man who he hates and idolizes in equal measure right now. This is such a good bit of foreshadowing. And it also shows that Damien, for all the painful adjustment and growing he will have to do in the course of his quest, is the same man now as he is a few years later, the foundation of his character doesn't actually change.

(Is Damien an elaborate case of Stockholm syndrome?)

But the Church didn’t dare use his name, because that might have invoked something of his spirit. They struck it from the books.

And yet Damien, you know it. Is it another sign of how far up in the Church hierarchy Damien actually is? Or is he just that much of a fanboy (and that much of a Knight of his Order) that he's in the know?

We don’t know what caused it. We’re not even sure exactly what happened.

We do later learn that it was well known that Gerald Tarrant had suffered a heart attack due to a congenital condition, and that there had been speculation it had set him off. Either Damien doesn't want to reveal that much to Zen or....what? He can't be wanting to keep Gerald's secrets at this point. Not important enough maybe right then?

I had another thought on Damien but it slipped my mind, I'll add it later if it comes back...

ETA (it came back!): Damien isn't having a crisis of faith [in his Prophet] precisely, Damien is having a "senpai noticed me" moment and just can't have that because Reasons.