BREAKER OF INFINITIES 2-46
Chapter: 2
“The king that holds the chains of the world must make his peace with them, link by link. They are heavier than any man, and they will not hesitate to break his bones.”
-Au Vam, Pankrator of the Yellow City
“The king that holds the chains of the world must make his peace with them, link by link. They are heavier than any man, and they will not hesitate to break his bones.”
-Au Vam, Pankrator of the Yellow City
Jagg’s such a drama queen. Just take a bubble bath or something dude.
Waiting for the final battle when Metatron’s shell explodes and the twisted, hideous thing inside slithers out.
It’s eyes all the way down.
From the Upanishads
NINETEENTH KHANDA.
‘When one believes, then one perceives.
One who does not believe, does not perceive.
Only he who believes, perceives.
This belief, however, we must desire to understand.’
‘Sir, I desire to understand it.’
Time is a flat fucking circle
So let’s see.
Zoss gives the key to a heir at the start of a cycle.
His stated goal with this is to “break the cycle”. Jagganath does not know that.
Practically, this seems to involve overthrowing the demiurges and stopping them from hurting people.
I would guess this especially includes Jagganath, who wants to hurt people ultimate and “end all suffering”. But I’m speculating.
I can’t guess where Metatron fits in on Zoss’s side. Jagganath’s story that he’s willingly given the key to Zoss doesn’t seem to fit with what we have seen of him – a twisted, tortured, immobile near-corpse. And the idea of ending creation and reducing everything back to YISUN’s infinite perfection seems much more in line with what archangels usually want than working to stop someone from doing exactly that.
But anyway, the guidance and feathers from Metatron makes Jagganath invincible. His task cannot fail; has not ever failed.
What task is that? It’s not to end existence, because:
Every time he gets close to doing that Zoss turns back time and starts the cycle again.
I suspect the only thing Jaggy never fails at is beating the other demiurges and the heir. With all their power at his command he’s able to do something conclusive to Metatron, and then Zoss steps in. Over and over. Billions of times. I really hope the cycle is only the year or so that’s passed in the comic, for Jaggy’s sake.
The solution is obviously to change something. Zoss tries to do that. Apparently just picking Allison was enough to terminally confuse the prophecy. Could he perhaps just. . .not make a heir? I suspect he’s locked into that plan. As it stands at the start of the cycle he’s apparently quite weak (able to get beheaded by a mere angel and all), and being desperately hounded and generally not in a good position to open parlay with Jagganath who’s one year away from obliterating the multiverse. Or it could be a condition of the time travel loop or something. There’s a lot of moving parts in his scheme and a lot of them we don’t know about.
On the other hand, Jagganath could change everything if he just refuses to fight. That idea is not ridiculous to the Red God, it’s perfectly alien. I doubt it would occur to him if he had the chance to do it over a million times. Oh wait.
I suspect every time time resets it kills an heir, perhaps Zoss took nine cycles himself, before then picking heirs for all the rest.
It’s a classic time travel trope, you do the dying first, then once you figure it out, you start making choices and altering streams.
The paths of the blood of his heirs is straight parallel lines, maybe he is trying to reach a certain outcome, and any normal man dies after one universe reset.
Maybe all his other heirs fought jagganoth and lost once, and Zoss fought and lost 9 times.
We shall see.
So for the first time the Heir is not male, and a Three Banger (which has never been accomplished before) bears the key, and Jagger hasn’t noticed these things or thinks they are trivial? A trifle hard to believe. Methinks the demi doth protest too much.
Think there’s still room for “…until now” or something to be his next line?
“We retain little memory of each cycle”…
I’m not sure Jagg recalls anything more than the general shape of the game.
Is that one of Farron’s abyss watchers among the fallen heirs?
I’m REALLY hoping that I’m beginning to get the title of this book.
The way I’m reading this… a piece of the puzzle is missing.
Jagganoth claims this exact cycle has happened already millions of times, and that he has “never lost” fighting this battle. If that’s true, then a likely conclusion is that the chances are Jagg would not have allowed this kind of cycle to continue at least ONCE before, right? Does Jagganoth r e a l l y believe this is the first time ever that he has rebelled against this wheel? If he’s “never lost,” then he’s always had the ability to “cut the true world from this corpse reality,” yet, EVERY SINGLE spin of the wheel before this one, Jagganoth has allowed this to happen.
So then… why? Am I misreading something?
He doesn’t really know. It might be the first; it might be the billionth. The only thing a being like this can do, is go HAMF at the apparent problem. Even if you may have tried it a trillion times before, and lost, and been forced to forget.
I dunno, man.
Jagg’s dialogue in the last panel here seems pretty clear-cut. I’m unsure about calling him an unreliable narrator here…
There’s more to this, I’m sure of it.
His logic is contradictory, because he doesn’t realize he is fulfilling his intended purpose. His desires have been accounted for in the simulation, and so even though he is “inviolate” he knows he never loses a *fight* but not why he has never won at fixing the universe.
Once he is smart enough to figure out that he’s doing their work for him, he could break the cycle by doing something else.
He thinks he’s doing that, but needs to think his way through a few more layers.
wouldn’t it be funny if time is only a prison for jag, and all the previous heirs are being kept in stasis outside of time so that a million heirs would fight against whomever when some condition is met?
I only just realized that we have already heard a tale quite similar to this…
from Zoss himself.
I am inclined to think that Jaggy has fooled himself.
King of Swords 10:141
“He who masters the wheel cannot break it.”
It certainly lines up, especially with the dialogue on the last panel on this page! Jagganoth must be missing something!
This dude literally just said “I am inevitable”
…and now it’s gotten interestinger…
.. is it important that Metatron ang Jagganoth seem to be bound in the same stoney-skinned manner?
So basically the world is a JRPG and Jag is what happens after the credits roll and you start a new game and overwrite the old save file.
The King chooses an Heir. A boy with little sense and an excess of courage.
It suddenly occurs to me that the character with the greatest excess of courage in this story is… 82 White Chain Born in Emptiness Returns to Subdue Evil, who has proven this by returning from death more often than any other angel. If Zoss could see far enough ahead to the time where White Chain would combine with Allicio, it would be a truly huge departure from his usual choice of Heir. And if that were not enough of a clue, White Chain also happens to be female(ish) at the moment against all the norms for angels.
But wait, Yabalchoath is also arguably the bravest of her kind, having invaded Yre and stolen a fragment of Mammon’s key from his brow (recalling the story of Luthien and Beren One-Hand vs. Morgoth, but I digress).
At the same time, Allison was (and arguably still is) senseless enough to fulfill that aspect of the Heir.
And this singularly senseless and doubly courageous triple entity is wearing the Key at the moment? Perhaps the choice Zoss made is more accute than we have been giving him credit for.
Aspected Chaos stands at the hub of creation, and the wheel is poised to spin!
“so, basically, I’m tired of being the janitor”
Then he should stop cleaning up, what an idiot.
It is possible he is Compelled to.
Zoss’ cage has rules … and Jaggy is playing in those rules.
Okay so I am Suuuuuuper high right now and let me tell you that not only did SOBER me not see this twist(?) coming, but HIGH me is absolutely mind freaked right now. I’m like “whaaaaaaaaat”
I think what he mieans when he says he’s never lost, is that he always kills the other demiurges, and possibly the heir. Also, It now makes so much more sense why everyone wanted to get the key back to Zaid, to try to make the cycle right again, but it probably won’t be enough at this point. Because of that, I think Jags is attacking much earlier than he normally does, in the attempt to kill the heir and get the key before Zoss can do his thing
Now I’m just imagining Allison going “Whoops. I got so distracted by what you were saying that my concentration slipped and now the entire flying island is falling. Sorry. My bad”
Jagganoth my man, you have just established that they can mess around with your gray matter when they reset things. You may want to apply a bit more critical thinking and wonder if this really just extends to making you forget things instead of actively implanting false memories (like, for example, memories of totally for some reason suddenly no longer getting full amnesia when previously you had). Given the themes of this comic I’m going to make a guess that Jagganoth hasn’t managed to beat a single heir and that Zhoss is resetting because his heirs don’t learn the lessons we have seen him try to teach. They fail him by being given this spiel from Jagganoth and then murking Jagganoth anyway instead of breaking the cycle so he says ‘congrats, here is your prize’ before turning the wheel again to start a new cycle.
That could be a twist indeed, the heirs always win the fight but never the moral victory, so Zoss kills them himself and starts over.
We shall have to see who does the killing.
They always get seduced by the power and try to go down the path Zoss did.
That’s why he was so upset when Allison went to pursue Mammon. She was pursuing the Throne.
What’s different in this cycle is that the true heir and final sucessor — Zaid — doesn’t have the key. He has (can get) all the nominal authority, but not the ultimate power of the voice of God. And he’s mortal. Whether this is Zoss’ new plan, some other player’s plan, or chance is not yet revealed.
Back in RL, I live in a place where the head of state has not one vestige of real power. We like it that way; it’s part of the least bad way of governance.
BAH! Zaid is not the true heir, everyone merely mistakes him to be the heir because they expect a man, and the thorn knights came and took him for that reason. Clearly Allison is the heir and Zaid was in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing. Everyone thinking he’s the heir is merely his ounishment for his poor morals.
He may not deserve to be the heir. He may not be the one that Zoss chose. He may not be the person in the prophecy. But I believe that he will end up as the nominal king of creation, passively filling the void at the top of the heap, while the holder of the real power is elsewhere, not using her power to rule or to reign. Thus are the worlds freed from true tyranny.
It *has* been revealed that it’s Zoss’s new plan — we just didn’t realize it at the time.
Seeker of thrones 9-101. Panel 6.
“So you seek the throne, then. Hm. I thought this cycle might bear out differently.”
Oh my Yis-Un. Juggernaut Star broke the cycle at the very start of this story. Was it an accident? Or rebellion?
If he is the end of the cycle, and he has never lost, is he not the one upholding the cycle?
Give up thy pride, Jagganoth, lose this battle to break the cycle that thou wish to set assunder.
So Alison probably isn’t the true heir, Zaid is. They were right after all. It wasn’t a wrong interpretation of the prophecy or the assumption the heir was male. The prophecy is a cycle and the key was given to someone else intentionally to try and break it.
Or maybe Jagg is wrong?
or maybe Zoss chose a woman as an heir in hopes that that would break the cycle.
if the revelation was that after trillions of cycles the only thing is that Allison is a woman would be pretty dumb, tbh
The first pannel _really_ made me shudder. Truly impressive. Scary stuff. And I’m getting really intrigued with all this metatemporal intrigues (as if I wasn’t intrigued for several yaers already, huh). Well, let us wait for the further development…
And we are still to see an introductory card, yeah. Even a couple of them.
We are going full Final Destination now. Is this just for dramatic effect or does Allison plan on tossing him into space?