BREAKER OF INFINITIES 4-145
After wandering further, Prim came across a crater many miles across. The edges were smooth, like glass, and curved inwards, down into a steadily increasing darkness, where at the bottom Prim could barely see a hole. The hole was extremely unpleasant to look at. Not a single mote of light touched it. As she took in this unsettling sight, Prim was shocked to see the distant figures of people, crawling up the edge of the crater, and steadily but inevitably sliding into the massive hole, where they were swallowed.
A croaking cough emerged a short distance away from Prim, and she beheld an unbelievably filthy and emaciated old man, who was clothed only in a ragged sheet draped over his head and body. He had a staff, like a shepherd, and it was broken at the tip.
“What is this place?” said Prim, trying to hide her disgust.
The man wet his dry lips, and said, “This is the end of the road. Or one of its ends anyway.” He motioned to the hole.
“The hole?” said Prim.
“If you go into the hole,” said the man, “you will very definitely die. Your entire existence will be permanently obliterated, almost instantly. It is very painful and causes tremendous scarring. The filth from your obliterated corpse will spread into the air like ash and sicken people for years.”
“It’s not the cleanest way to reach the end,” he said, hacking out a dry cough, “but its very easy.” He leered at Prim with a brown-toothed smile, as if expecting her to agree.
Prim left immediately.
I’ll take a hashbrown, chief
hashbrowns with mushroom and onion over here, chief
Ay, but what about second breakfast?
For second breakfast, fried eggs over rice.
And the filth from obliterated corpses.
I mean obviously. Always take your breakfast with obliterated corpse filth, as my mother always said.
y u m m e r s
Suffering was not chosen, nothing is chosen remember? It is all predetermined.
Choice is a relative illusion. Jadis saved Allison because that’s what she did; in the crystallized amber of causality, that’s always what she would do at that time in that place. Allison pursues the path of suffering because that’s what she does; whether the choice matters or not, it’s the part Allison once and always decided to walk.
Jadis over here using the seductive powers of maple syrup to rip apart the very fabric of destiny.
okay but what if it was A grade Vermont syrup, that’s a very convincing argument.
what if it’s just flavored corn syrup but Jadis tells you it’s A-grade Vermont syrup
I tell the Syrup it is A-grade Vermont and it is! What good is the Art if not for that.
You eat it anyway because that is what you do. It is so written. You have no choice but to eat the flavored corn syrup. To live is to suffer.
Actually, grade-B syrup is superior. Darker and more maple-y.
That’s the best comment I’ve ever read on this site! It’s nice to know that some people actually know their food, instead of watch cooking shows and pretend to know things that they don’t.
She knows all possible outcomes, she asks why Allison “chooses” struggle, she knows no matter how clear it is to her that nothing matters, and that whether she decides to take on or relinquish her burden it is ultimately meaningless, she will continue with the responsibility resting between her eye holes.
It’s tough to tell, after all that’s been said and experienced, whether the choice of breakfast is out of hospitality or mockery of Allison’s concept of free will.
BREAKFAST OF INFINITES
Oh man I could go for one of those.
One always regrets forgets what it was like last time they ordered the Big Breakfast
I choose: CHAOS MEAL!
One brunch with bottomless mimosas and bloody Marys coming up.
Mmm, breakfast
“A choice between breakfast and not breakfast is no choice at all.” Probably Jadis.
“If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers, let us make BREAKFAST”
For the last time: YOU choose what we’re gonna eat. You’re the pickiest eater! I’ll down for anything. I don’t care!
In truth, the picky eater is just as much to blame as the eater with no opinion at all. A group where all agree that they are open to every option is just as deadlocked.
My approach when dealing with that is to pick my personal favorite. Anybody who wants to do something else *has to have a counterproposal*.
If they can’t come up anything they want to eat more, apparently it,’s their favorite too.
I like the Prim story it’s a nice counterbalance
Yeah, now that you mention it! It also seems like a refutation of Jadis’s worldview, hers is nihilism to the extreme where nothing matters, nothing has any point whatsoever, and there is nothing to do about it or any real way that you could even make an impact in anything. It’s hopeless and enclosed and miserable, but it’s also very easy. It’s easy to say it doesn’t matter and just sit back and do nothing and watch the world burn, it’s easy to decide to spare yourself the suffering and effort and just not care, while it’s very hard to continue working and continue fighting even if it’s all pointless, but it’s ultimately a much more fulfilling way to live. Just look at where all of that thinking got Jadis, trapped in a block of glass, croaking out painful visions that only she can see. There are just way better ways to live.
Jadis looked upon infinity and saw Nothing, no point and no reason, and it broke her. If nothing matters, then what’s the point? Choice is meaningless, hope is futile, every action empty. She chose to follow that grim nihilism as sterile inevitability, something that happens in spite of you. She is a prisoner of Nothing.
While on the other side, that is also true freedom. If nothing matters and everything is a given, then we are free to assign what meaning we want to whatever we want, because nothing has meaning baked in. She saw Infinity hoping to find something, anything to make the countless sacrifices she and her family before her made, and saw nothing. She broke because she craved meaning and found dust. This works into her Word, rather than choose action and assign meaning as she would, she chose the easy path and obliterated herself.
If she’s a nihilist, that kinda begs the question as to why Jadis does anything at all, or is even still alive to offer breakfast. It seems to me someone shackled to that outlook would self-terminate long before now.
So yeah I’m thinking this is just a really good portrayal of an embodiment of Sloth, and it’s kinda disturbing that it seems to be the most tempting and convincing one yet.
“Struggle is all there is,” said YISUN, “want and struggle are the twin essences of existence, and to rest is death. You are a mercurial fighter, quick of finger, you hate stagnation and thirst terribly for power. You accept the world not as it is but seek greater shapes beyond, and strive fiercely to carve it to your will with the dread instruments of hunger
Choose breakfast, Allison. And eat.
My payment, a word of advice: If you encounter Breakfast on The Road, Eat it.
In my personal experience if you encounter breakfast on the road, best leave it and avoid the tea wagon from whence it came, it wasn’t left there for nothing.
Prim can’t catch a break.
REACH HEAVEN THROUGH…breakfast?
Every time, every time, Prim chooses the road. It is hard to walk upon the road. It bruises her small feet, once delicate, once white and soft, now calloused and dirty. And yet she chooses the road, every time.
Allison is the same. The Witch Outside Her Glass might know this- she knows everything -but is knowledge understanding? Knowing something to be true but never understanding it sounds like a very exquisite Hell indeed.
Jadis’ comments grow increasingly self-contradictory.
Per her previous statements, time is a linear inescapable progression of event to event, something which has caused her no end of trauma.
But here she states that the world is impermanent and chaotic… but given her altered point of view that can’t be the case. Being omniscient, every point in time would be distinct, ‘frozen in amber’, and in knowing everything the systems could hardly be chaotic since she’d be aware of the cause and effect of everything that had happened over all of time.
Not chaos as unpredictability, but chaos as unordered, homogenous entropy.
I notice Jadis’ abode has a somewhat fractal appearance. Hmmm…Fractals. Chaos. Iterations, each similar but never the same.
I am old and tired and me brains ain’t what they used to be, I’ll just leave this here for someone younger and brighter to play with.
sounds to me like SOMEONE hasn’t grasped the mind-breaking nature of the universe. now, I ain’t some omniscient witch-queen-prophet, but it seems to me like she knows what she’s talking about when she describes reality. have you considered that maybe reality is simultaneously a series of infinite static instants and also impermanent and chaotic? just because that’s contradictory nonsense that doesn’t make any sense doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
one can trace out lines and pathways through mycelium, but the mycelium is always hungry, and will move out from underneath your tracings, seeking its next meal
Is that next meal breakfast?
Not to mention that she keeps on intervening. Why would she bother? Is this a hobby of hers? Is it simply that she likes Allison?
Jadis: In eighteen days and nine minutes you will be reconciled with all this. Then we can be friends. While there is no point to friendship, it is pleasant. I look forward to it. Perhaps… you could try a scone. With jam. 🙂
“Jadis’ comments grow increasingly self-contradictory.”
That’s quite the point. Just open your Psalms and look at the very beginning. Remember?
7. Only an idiot cannot place his absolute certainty in paradoxes. The divine suicide is a perfect paradox. A man cannot exist without paradox – that is the full of it.
And Jadis is no idiot. Crazy as a five-wheeled bike, may be, but certainly nibody’s fool.
I can make no judgement on her foolishness or her madness, merely note that what she says now seems to contradict what she said before.
Nothing is certain.
Not at all. Like all paradoxes, the contradiction stems from lack of information or lack of precision or ambiguity in the concepts. In Classical Mechanics (Newtonian Physics) there exists the concept of Deterministic Chaos, which started the whole thing called Chaos Theory. A solution of such systems is perfectly determined, both in its future and its past,but, nevertheless the system is chaotic and unpredictable, given that two posible solutions that are as close as to be undistingishable given any finite precision, will wander off from each other in a very *CHAOTIC* manner.
Except to Jadis, the system isn’t unpredictable.
well lah-de-dah with your pyramid inside a bigger pyramid
I know!
Khufu Is spinning in his single, non-recursive pyramid!
“Yes, let’s tell the poor stupid mortal that nothing matters and then ask her to make a banal choice.” That’s going going to confuse Allison at all.
I really think that, as much as Jadis knows everything, she doesn’t understand mortals at all.
I don’t think she knows everything at all. I think she has seen an incredibly detailed photograph of time, and believes that is all that can be.
For the last time, she is in fact omnipotent. It would be a complete waste of time and bad writing if it turned out she wasn’t.
You are confusing this with omniscience.
Jadis’s knowledge is flawless, it is simply her interpretation that is flawed. Despite all her rhetoric on lack of choice and meaning within the universe, she also accuses Allison of “choosing to suffer,” directly contradicting her own values.
Now, there are two possibilities for her behaviour. Either this is an intentional test to see if Allison is capable of seeing through this nonsense-knot of nihilism, or it is genuinely what Jadis believes and she is just as lost as every other demiurge.
No., her interpretation is not flawed.
She. Is. Omnipotent. She knows everything. All of the things that any one could, theoretically, know, she knows. She know the who, the what, the where, the when, the why, and the how of all questions and mysteries in all of the universes.
If she didn’t, then she wouldn’t be omnipotent, because then there would be things she didn’t know.
How can an omnipotent person answer a question incorrectly?
I’m sorry, I meant to say OMNISCIENT, not omnipotent.
That’s my bad.
By lying.
Yes, that. She’s lying, to Allison, at least. Perhaps to herself as well.
Because we either decide she’s wrong somehow, or the story is over.
I guess the question is what the hell does it mean to “know everything”? Like how do you define the act of knowing? If you know all of causality, meaning your knowledge can’t change anything, you’re not making any decisions based off of that knowledge, so what’s remotely the point? What possible impact could knowledge of all things have if you explicitly can’t do anything about it? She’s not a character, she’s the author saying “because I said so”. The only way for her to not be bad storytelling is to be flawed or have her omniscience overpowered by some cycle-breaking stuff — which does mean she shouldn’t really be taken seriously, as I don’t think Abaddon is going to write himself that far into a hole.
Jadis also has no choice but to ask, right?
You can’t rush grief like that.
But what if breakfast is suffering?
BREAKFAST OF INFINITIES
THE TWO-SYLLABLE NAME OF THE SEVEN-COURSE MEAL REVEALED
Q: What’s going on here?
A: BEKFASST
bass pro shop pyramid inception.
Where is Thrones sun? It was visible earlier and it doesn’t move.
These stories assert that no story can have a good end.
What is an ending? Is it the defeat of the antagonist? Their victory? Is it the end of the Protagonist’s narrative journey or the end of their life?
There is only one ending of a story. It is the same ending as the ending of every story. It is when you choose to stop telling it.
You know the worst part about Jadis? She is so infinitely boooooooring.
I like Jadis because she’s refreshingly honest. Other demiurges tried to manipulate Alison to their own ends, but she understands that it’s pointless. She’s simply telling her how it is, because she knows that nothing she says can change her mind. In fact, no one can change anything.
So you might just as well have breakfast.
I’d argue that this is just another form of manipulation. If you want your opponent to lose, convincing them to not fight is a valid tactic.
Only she isn’t telling it like it is. Despite all her rhetoric on lack of choice and meaning within the universe, she also accuses Allison of “choosing to suffer,” directly contradicting her own supposed values.
There’s nothing honest about Jadis’s form of nihilism. Value is something assigned by the individual, and a lack of big-picture significance does not in any way change that. After all, we are the universe comprehending itself. When we decide to value something, that is quite literally the universe assigning that thing value.
This presents a terrible responsibility. Without universal values, we each have to provide out own reasons and values for existing. Jadis uses her nihilism to avoid having to choose.
Ot alternatively, this is a test and she want to see if Allison can realize all this for herself.
Huge, recursive pyramid is somewhat cool, but mainly for its size than for its nesting. I am driven to handwave-estimate how tall it is. Panel 6: about four times as tall as a typical god-corpse, about twice as tall as the tallest of those. We know from other pages that the tallest gods are not quite as tall as the tiers of the Red City. We know from the Throne blurb in Broken Worlds that the _doors_ in the outer walls of Throne are a mile tall (!), so the walls are maybe twice that. That puts the pyramid somewhere around the 4-mile mark.
Regardless of the exact numbers, the pyramid is the second-largest single structure in a world consisting entirely of fuck-off big structures. Could Jadis’ family be over-compensating for something?
Jadis REALLY needs to work on her segways.
“Choose breakfast.”
Ok!
BREAKER OF INFINITIES? More like BREAKER OF FASTS…
What breakfast will you choose, hm? The bacon of kings? Or the oatmeal of peasants?
Eggs with paprika and sliced tomato, actually.