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
A boy with little sense
no eyes and no defence;
he can’t hear what against
Oh, so HE IS ALREADY HERE?
Jagg increasingly reminds me of a certain breed of leftist thought on twitter. ‘Burn everything down, gods and masters be damned, everybody and everything is terrible but *I* actually have the secret knowledge and *I* actually know what’s best’, in spite of a painful naivete in regards to how humanity and systems of thought and control actually work, and the assumption that what comes after all that destruction can only be better and not much, much worse. He doesn’t even know all the rules of the game he’s playing, and yet he’s ready to sweep all the pieces off the table.
I mean that’s not limited to leftist extreme views, that sort of “burn down the corrupt system and replace it with what I think is right” describes most extremist revolutionary and/or militant mindsets.
You don’t have to know what’s best to know that what currently exists is wrong. Fixing things is hard, in part because it’s hard to convince the people benefiting from the current arrangement that there’s anything to be fixed. It’s easier to break things, and hope people will work together to fix them, once they all agree that it’s broken.
Indeed. When you think a system’s rotten to the very core or flawed at it’s most fundamental levels then it often leads to the idea that things are really beyond fixing. And in lieu of fixing, tearing it all down seems like the most logical thing to do. “Turning it off and on again”, as it were. I can definitely understand the view.
Fixing things is also hard because the intermediate states between Wrong and Better are usually Worse and sometimes Absolutely Sodding Terrible. “People benefiting” are sometimes just citizens trying to stay afloat.
Getting from the top of a small hill to the top of a tall mountain often requires you to walk down the hill first. And if there’s water in between, then you may have to swim.
The people just trying to stay afloat may do better in a more equitable system, but it’s understandable that it’s still hard to take risks from that position. Things could be better, but they could also be worse, and they might not survive the transition to better.
I have been playing a lot of TES recently and since KSBD and TES lore share a lot of sensibilities I have to wonder wether Jagganoth is a Alduin or more of a Numidium.
Meaning is he gods intended garbage collector or is he more of a memory leak killing the system?
Is he the intended garbage collection system? Yes, and just to make sure he works, he’s been made un-deletable.
Is he a memory leak destroying the system? He would very much like to be, though judging by Juggernaut Star’s comments and his own “those of us” statement here, he’s not the only one.
He has never lost, but Rajuba has 2 suns, and if Alison puts him either in the center of one or in the Laplace point between them he cannot escape even if he is indestructible. Or can he via “magic”?
The key of kings’ primary function is teleportation.
I’ve lost the thread of the plot. Still enjoying the ride.
He really wasn’t kidding when he called himself a dustman. I can see why he’s so bitter, I’ve also worked jobs consisting cleaning up other peoples’ messes. Granted, I used a mop rather than a sword, but a mop is far more useful in most respects.
Praise to my Fellow Votaries for everyones efforts to make sense of the Gordian Knot Abbadon has presented.
Appreciation for Ol’ Jack’s comment re: the power of Mop vs Sword.
The following fun quote is in reference to Lord Jagganoth’s confession:
“I’m the Frickin’ Apocalypse Janitor -and this job Sucks ! But It’s What I DO, and It’s ALL I Know How to Do.”
Scene :[Hooky’s in the bar mopping blood off the floor after a long night when the Street Preacher enters, quoting the Bible. ]
Street Preacher: “They Err in Vision, they Stumble in Judgment, for all the tables are full of Vomit and Filthiness, so that there is no place Clean. – Isiah.”
[Hooky considers this then grins]
Hooky : “You should have seen it BEFORE !”
~ Johnny Mnemonic, 1995
Oneirimancer honours these bones with the gift of references to classic 90’s sci-fi movies. References are the true currency of the learned and the geek.
“Violence is inescapable. Inseparable from life itself. Permanent. It is fixed in your cosmology. Forever.”
— VWF
Can we get a round of drinks and a moment of silence for VWF?
Anybody having some money on that Jagg don’t actually know what he is talking about? Either because he is just wrong or because he is crazy?
So, re: all the “wait, isn’t Jaggy just doing the same thing that failed to fix anything every other cycle then?” stuff. As a couple other people have noted, the sequence matters. The path for each cycle, at least according to Jagg, is: the heir, bearing the key of kings, overthrows the corrupt lords, then takes the throne, then Jaggy omnicides everybody to clean up for Metatron and Zoss hits the reboot button.
This go-round, Jaggy’s plan is to yoink the key of kings for himself before the heir gets even close to the throne, and use that to kill Metatron before anything else. So that then he can use the power of the key of kings to not just wipe the slate, but also be the one to write something NEW on it. He doesn’t want to reset time and start over like Metatron and Zoss have apparently been doing, he wants to burn everything down because his life experiences (poor Yaun) have taught him that reality is unfixably broken and the only way to have a world worth living in is to build a brand new one starting from first principles. Which he will then erase himself from, because a monster like him has no place in a perfect world. Think kinda like the Operative from Serenity, except he has no more patience for taking orders from anybody else and is going to seize power and make a perfect world himself.
Dangerously fanatical without a doubt, but tragic more than conventionally monstrous. Which I really like in an antagonist as it breaks the mold a bit from the “standard” motivation set of this kind of “I wanna destroy literally everything” enemy. He’s not a sadist or a nihilist. He’s the most terrifying thing of all to face; a perfect, utterly uncompromising idealist.
Jaggoth, I think, dosn’t realize the flaw in this thinking- he can’t create a perfect new reality. So, in his all-or-nothing way, he’ll destroy that new universe, and try again. And when that’s not perfect, he’ll have to end that universe too. And then the next. And the next, and the next…
So, his plan to stop a god-being from eternally re-writing history is to become a new god-being eternally re-writing history. He is the very thing he rallies against.
Crackpot theory: there’s an even bigger cycle of history-cycling god-beings endlessly usurping each other
Huh, this uhh… doesn’t make the possible appearance of future Allison way back when very comforting.
Young men hmmm? Perhaps this is the problem. Men make exceptionally poor swordsmen.
perhaps the answer lies with Metatron. Angels harden over time and he appears exempt from this cycle. The wheel of the time when he was created has already been broken, so Metatron may just be gaining marginal strength with each cycle. Eventually enough to go on an omnicodal journey through the cosmos
I…think I was with you right up until that last panel, Jagganoth. Like, if I understand you correctly, the heir always defeats the “lords of the world” (corresponding to the demiurges in this iteration), thus claiming absolute victory and the throne of Heaven…and THEN you rise up from whatever your previous role was, and somehow (you don’t know how) become crucial to the end of that iteration of the multiverse. Ok, fine. How does ANY of that lead to you winning THIS fight?! If anything, this seems like the point in the story where the Heir defeats all the lords of the world – INCLUDING YOU – and then, only AFTER he’s exulted in his VICTORY, do you finally ruin everything. So where the hells is that last boast COMING from?!
Agreed, I can’t seem to reconcile this either. The heir needs to beat the Seven to take the throne pretty unambiguously – we’ve heard the same sequence from Micheal who said it was Metatron’s – and the figures Jadis protected for her prophecy seem to confirm Jagg counts as one of the Seven to beat. Something is definitely still missing.
I’ve been trying to figure that out as well. How does Jagganoth show up to clean everything up if he’s already numbered among the lords of heaven that the Heir defeated. Only way I can square it is if Jagganot’s defeat never sticks. He’s knocked down, hurled into the void, bound in chains…but somehow comes back. I don’t like it as an explanation, seems too pat. Too easy for someone as tricky as Abbadon.
Maybe this is the first time he was one of the lords. No reason Allison has to be the cycle’s only or first anomaly.
So it appears that Zaid was the heir in the most recent previous cycle, called it!
Zoss’ right arm is missing,and so does Allison’s arm on the title page for this chapter. Hmmmmm
And we can see the same tree pattern that Zoss wears on his belt on Allison’s prosthetic. Interesting, what it could mean
The man on the right on the top panel does look like Zaid (`・ω・´)
this is an excellent opportunity for Jadis Q&A. She would know what Zoss is doing when the heir takes the throne — she saw the shape of the wheel!
well, things kinda changed just a little bit this time around. that’s probably going to add some uncertainty in there
“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov
Surtr sits at the edge of the world, a sword in hand, waiting patiently for the end of the world.
Can we get a Zoss’s belt buckle as merch?
I wonder if the favor Alison owes to Himself will have an effect on this. Also if the fact that she appears to be the first female heir means anything. Also also if Kill Six Billion Demons is a time traveling Alison and/or a previous heir.
Says the guy about to lose.
There’s an endless cycle of violence that keeps repeating, and every time I get what seems like the end of it, after killing everything in my path, it starts over. What am I doing wrong?
MUST KILL HARDER, obviously