BREAKER OF INFINITIES 4-143
Prim, after some time, began to grow tired of the road.
She had become accustomed to it, in the way that the shapes of her body fit its grooves and whorls in a kind of tired obedience. Her feet were hardened and calloused from years of walking. Since leaving her father’s house, she had done nothing but walk. Even though prim was very small and white, and had very small hands, she was not like the soft and tender-footed maidens with full stomachs that populated the crepuscular palaces of the outer realms at that time. She was wiry and dust-blown, and bent constantly towards the horizon.
On her travels, Prim had met many sages, warriors, and poets. She had traveled through many realms, and trod across the soil of many lands. Through it all she had summered with princes, taken refuge at countless hermitages, and even lived as an errant musician for a while, sleeping tucked into an attic in a many hued city, shored up with the intoxication of youth and the faint warmth of drifting and forgotten friendships.
And yet, all that was behind her. The road always pulled her back, making rapid past tense of everything, gobbling it up like a starving stray, and she was sick of seeing it. Her heart was glad to be free of the iron cage of her childhood, and yet it longed for a resting place, a nook in which to nestle until the soreness could drain from her body.
She began, then, to wonder where the road ended.
– Prim Masters the Road
She says she only saw Nothing and yet I presume that she unknowingly also saw everything, such is the nature of the situation. I’m sure that Allison will continue to blunder through this but hopefully, she is destined to leave this situation with a relatively normal amount of trauma relative to previous close encounters with Demiurges.
Show us the way, Prim.
Well, it can be the special kind of nothing, like buddhist Śūnyatā. Things has no self (“I CAN’T EVEN SEE MY OWN MIND “) and no substantial existence.
Or Alison just referring to abstinence of sense of life.
Jadis must have been amazingly foolish to be involved in seeking this knowledge. If her universe were non-deterministic then the information would be a brief snapshot of one moment in time and gone the next. In her deterministic universe unless she can restart spacetime with new variables the information is useless. But I suppose being fated means she had no option but to be foolishly optimistic.
This is just a normal breakfast
Everybody seems so worried about determinism, but surely if everything is determined it is also perfect? It can’t be any other way, so it is all it can be.
We have been told that he who masters the wheel cannot break it. Alison is dangerously close to mastery.
would have thought she saw everything, rather
What is the box?
NOTHING!
Wow, this is exactly what an anxiety attack feels like! I hate it!
I think she finally gets it. She was always meant to win in the end (because this is a story written by an author), and every choice she makes leads toward that conclusion. She’s not even making those choices but they are written for her, which is why she sees ‘nothing’ when she looks at the reality.
So…she’s aware of the fact that she and everyone else in the comic is fictional?
As is Jadis, I assume? Since she also saw the same “nothing”?
Also, you’re saying that “she was always meant to win in the end”, but Jadis, the LITERALLY OMNISCIENT CHARACTER WHO KNOWS LITERALLY ALL THE THINGS, explicitly said “We lost”.
Allison can’t win, because the literally omniscient Jadis said she already lost. And they would both know this, in your scenario, because they have seen what the writer will have them do and say for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, I don’t think this theory is particularly stable or strong. Sorry.
I mean, none of the demiurges have been correct. Jadis being omniscient and therefore by definition correct doesn’t mean anything, the universe is the result of self-sacrificial division by a consummate liar and they’ve said as much themselves when asked about it.
Jadis is correct and Jadis cannot possibly be correct, and this contradiction is important. If Allison wasn’t about to shatter the chains of determinism, I doubt this book would be titled “Breaker of Infinities.”
We just have to wait until Jadis ceases to be right.
I suppose I should add since I can’t edit that I don’t really think Allison has broken the fourth wall or anything, really, and would be disappointed if that was the actual thing Allison saw, so I don’t really agree with tronn’s theory either. I just don’t think that Jadis being omniscient (and all that implies) is anything except an obstacle to be overcome in a story like this – she won’t be omniscient forever. I’ve got faith in that much.
Well, I was being charitable when I wrote “she will win,” because the fans get upset when you even suggest that Jadis is right and that the comic might have a downer ending. Whether she will win or lose, that has already been decided by Abaddon, and he will write her making all the decisions that lead to that pretermined conclusion. She can’t rebel and tear herself off the comic’s pages.
Alison please. It’s your first breakfast in a long time. Don’t ruin it.
Ironically, this horrible mental assault may be a healing moment. Allison has needed to scream for a long time.
If the internalised screaming be eternalised, may the inside become calm?
Tedious, tread
your sole to your head
Grinds flour for bread
This arch is giving me mad drug flashbacks.
To survive the infinite abyss that one has gazed upon, one must accept the abyss as it is. It is nothing to fear or even think about, really. So what if your place in it is meaningless. The concept should free you of guilt, remorse, and foreboding. You are a simple mote in God’s eye, and will escape judgement by being so very very small and insignificant.
I mean… we all know what it looked like, right? It’s not just me?
What do you mean? I didn’t see anything.
I feel Yisun’s four lies, particularly the lie of the Iron Plum and Water House, are applicable here
nothing exists, but it’s somethingness’s are beautiful, the Plum’s taste and texture, the house of water’s beauty. how both are temporary
Yay! The tale of Prim is back!
Everything and Nothing are two of a kind, like giants and ants. I once heard they love one another as fiercely as they fight.
That last panel is, as the term goes, a mood.
To get very, very vague, nothingness, like infinity, probably can’t be fully captured in one finite statement. The mathematician Georg Cantor had a lot say about this. (The implications of set theory *will* break your brain!)
But to get back to poor Allison. Her senses and mind fully apprehended the ineffable and found it impossible to describe. Words failed her. Human concepts and mental processes failed her. There was simply no way for the finite number of atoms in her finite, three dimensional brain to arrange themselves to process and comprehend what she beheld.
So how can she describe it? Call it “nothing” or call it “everything?”
Now, maybe the Key grants her superhuman intelligence and godlike mental abilities and, if so, maybe that’s the reason why she still able to sit there taking tea with Jadis without hot steaming grey matter burping out of her ears. It is an ugly thing to see a human mind melt down over a divide by zero error!
Noticed on page BOI139-140 that Allison was labeled BOI139-149Allison…
I don’t know if it was a typo or if it hints that she has a few more pages of traveling through Eternity with Jadis, so this would be a layover till the return trip? or perhaps to the intended destination.
as it was told by YISUN (Chapter 1, Page 9)
Let me see. We got what I assume are boiled eggs, to go with it some scrambled eggs (?), tomato soup, what looks like a pickled potato in a glass, some brown stuff which is maybe meat and space toast.
I suspect no meat at all. Perfect knowledge of every abattoir in creation, ever, might make one vegetarian.
…or convince one to truly internalize the fact that vegetarianism doesn’t necessarily reduce suffering, and that to be alive is to destroy other life to remain so.
The fact that brussels sprouts’ mode of existence doesn’t map cleanly onto ours doesn’t mean it’s fun and good to be chopped to paste and dissolved in acid, then be torn apart further by microorganisms and left with nothing but stinking muck.
All life is an abattoir with unlimited observation.