WHEEL SMASHING LORD 2-33 to 2-34
Chapter: 2
“It is said that the Diktate Au Vam had a pillar four hundred handspans high set in the main marketplace of the Yellow City, and guarded by a man day and night. Upon the top of the pillar was a great stele upon which was engraved his name. Below were engraved the names of some four thousand lords, each of them of great standing, with large households and many servants. Upon Au Vam’s death, it was said the stele would be shattered, and the first name on the pillar crowned as the new king, and so on and so forth. But when the pillar was ground into the dirt, or the bearers of its names no longer alive, then there were no more men worthy in the city, and it would die a true and final death.”
– Ogdo, Tellar Historian
Man, does it sucks to be White Chain right now.
My last month’s paycheck was 11000 dollars. All I did was simple 0nline work from comfort at home for 6-8 hours/day that I got from this agency I discovered over the internet and they paid me 45 dollars every hour.
Visit for more detail.. www.Payathome7.com
Yes Gog-Agog, we will get back to you eventually.
being maguca is suffering
DO NOT THROW SOULS
kill six billion demons is about magical girls
and magical boys, occasionally some keys are involved
And swords. That are also sometimes keys.
Perhaps even boned. Maybe even a blade works.
Dont forget the Magical Men.
Solomon David was too much of goddamn hunk to be diminished to a “boy”
k6bd au where solomon david is 10 years old but otherwise everything is the exact same
that’s the hell of being in command. The Skipper always knows, the Skipper is always calm. If you panic, everybody under you panics. White Chain is basically Solomon now, trying to hold up what’s left of his empire, and she’s got a newly human form that bares little resemblance to her previous existence, and Jaggy’s army is running around killing everything that moves. That is a LOT to have on your plate and be in charge of it all.
I appreciate the boat metaphor, DrunkenNunStumbles
Keeping up appearances and all that
So… Yeah, turns out Solomon being the linchpin of his entire empire was kind of a crap idea, huh?
WHO WOULD’VE THOUGHT, HUH?
Many dynasties have ended because the current ruler didn’t plan for their own demise, and those ones didn’t even have a god-king.
Yeah Alexander the Great being the biggest and clearest example. But at least he died unexpectedly young; Solomon had literal millenia to set up a contingency plan.
The man could not imagine the world without himself in it, truly the definition of Pride.
I mean, we did get a scene where he outright _rejects_ a contingency plan. One of his sons brings up the idea of his succession and Solomon basically goes “nah, pass”.
I think it’s more sinister than him not being able to think of a world without him in it. It seems to me that he _did_ know that he might die and the Empire would probably crumble in his absence, but he thought that if it did then that was _right_. If it couldn’t stand without him it didn’t deserve to stand, etc.
All while actively denying it the things it would NEED in order to stand without him, possibly so that he could feel vindicated in the knowledge that it WOULD fall without him. Yikes.
“Re-elect me! I haven’t finished destroying you!”
Sounds like some of the US’s presidents.
…
Can we keep the ominous statements more fictional, please? I have enough issues with preincarnation and I don’t need more existential dread.
What a fascinating concept, preincarnation. I’d never heard of it until just suddenly now as I’ve said it aloud. But I had read of it. A few seconds ago.
Fascinating!
If i had a nickle for every comment that misread solomons entire character . . . The whole point was he diddnt trust anybody to run things in his stead. All his sones cared about was him naming a sucsessor, no real plans were put fourth. Also, he wasn’t actually opposed to stepping down after the tournament(that he only accepted his loss due to peer pressure from the crowd, because WC only brused him, and his condition was that actual blood was drawn.). He just mentioned that it wasn’t gonna be easy or simple process.
That being said, he should have still had something in place in case the inevitable war with jaggy went down, and he diddnt survive the battle. Or even a placeholder gov for if the war dragged on and he couldn’t be home.
Welp, if so many people “misread his entire character” maybe that ought to make you question your own read of it. Or at least consider that what we have been presented is hardly enough to really do anything but speculate about what his true motivations are, with no definitive answer.
But no, easier to just say that everyone else “misread’ him. I suppose that goes for White Chain calling him out during their fight at the tournament too.
As for stepping down, your read is very charitable. The guy previously said that unless he found someone “worthy” his crown would be “taken from me with blood alone”. I kind of doubt he truly considered White Chain “worthy” after inflicting a small scratch on him, and what he started to say could also be first sentence in him moving the goal posts. The man is not above breaking his word when he considers himself in the right: see the Ki Rata masters.
I’m sure he drinks his own Kool-aid, though. Whatever he decides is, in his mind, “for the best”, always. To paraphrase Om: he still thinks he’s the hero.
I thought he meant that only someone who could take his crown by blood would be worthy to wear it.
Precisely. Those mewling sons of his were unworthy: to appoint them his successors would not have preserved the Empire any more than it has been. Solomon’s failure was vanity—believing that none but him could accomplish the grand feat of running his Empire—but that doesn’t mean he was wrong about his sons.
Literally all the power Throne could grant him, all the Time in the universe itself, and the man STILL couldn’t be arsed to raise a decent child.
The same can be said for many businesses.
If no one else loyal can even scratch him, What other option is there?
Not make succession depend only on a contest of who can inflict the most violence.
To be fair, when you’re immortal and rule 111,111 universes, with the power to throw stars like our Sun with your bare hands… that’s definitely a good pillar to base anything on, really. Especially since his Word is largely defensive, making him the hardest to kill among the Demiurges back then. Until Jaggy got his nails…
From the opposite viewpoint, what possible plan could he come up with? His key can’t be split among a council. The whole city is clearly held together by his might as king, so finding someone suitable to replace him is basically pointing out a potential usurper. Said replacement might die of old age before Solomon dies, so they’d practically be encouraged to stage a coup. Leaving the people to decide, well, we’re seeing the result of that right now. Solomon’s obsession with ruling a utopia, ironically, doomed him and his city.
He COULD have split his key, it’s been long established that Demiurges can share their keys with other individuals. In the past there were presumably thousands of them before they were gradually condensed into the keys to the seven part world (I guess there’s only like four now?)
Oh, he could have done MANY things!
As 75,105,403 Clown Bitch Born On High To Die Miserably pointed out, he could easily have split his key and given it to elected council members (or even his current council, if he dislikes democracy that much).
He could have taught Ki-Rata to an elite guard of soldiers, or if he thought they could have tried to kill him, he could have made a decree that all citizens have a duty to learn and practice at least one martial art, since in this Multiverse martial arts give you magic powers and abilities beyond normal human strength.
So at least everyone in the empire would have had a way to fend for themselves, and Solomon’s elite guards (which here are inefficient and decorative at best) would have been able to evacuate people out of Rayuba and maybe even win the War for Rayuba.
(Which, by the way, is wildly different than owning a gun in the States : to achieve enough mastery to be overpowered means you control what you do, and your children can’t use your own martial arts to kill themselves while playing)
Slowly getting from Tyrant (in the Greek sense of the word) to Protector of Rayuba while transitionning into democracy over a period of a few hundred years would have been easy, honestly. Easier than what White Chains has to do now, at the very least.
But since Solomon wanted to be the Paternum of an Eternal Empire, and didn’t trust anyone but himself, he condemned his citizens to death and chaos the moment he would disappear.
And yes, I’m using a lot of what if here. But it does make sense that training more people to magic martial arts would have resulted in a less passive community of citizens and probably a lot less death.
7 Zombies is observant.
He could have done all those things, quite justly and properly, and still failed to save his people when Jagganoth arrived. The only way to save them was to have the god-fight somewhere else.
Well, if you teach everyone in the Empire magic martial arts, you’ll probably get the people with the strongest Martial arts oppressing those weaker than them, rather than everyone being oppressed equally.
And that’s where Solomon would have been useful- being the person who struck down those oppressors within his realm intermittently.
Thus, providing a force against raising successful oppressors, and hopefully allowing the strength of his realm to increase as a whole.
Solomon seems pretty down with oppression, though, as long as it is on his terms.
Well, he could have staged a some kind of tournament to find a worthy successor, and hand over the empire to the winner?
You have put your finger on the basic problem with hierarchical succession. The hierarchical bit gets in the way of the succession, or the succession results, sooner or later, in the overthrow of the hierarchy. Pree White Chain was observant when she asked him to abdicate. She didn’t just want HIM to step down, she wanted the entire system to change. I guess with angelic vision it’s easy to spot the logical flaws in people’s plans for world domination.
Logical flaws? Yes. Sometimes.
World domination is a logical end-state for some perspectives. It is in the angel’s initial conditions that determine which logical train of thought is given more weight, and angels in general dislike change in any form.
That’s the whole purpose of the Thorn Knights- to revert the multiverse of the Wheel back to what it was before Zoss, through any means necessary.
Eh to be fair his empire lasted a really long time with him alone as a linchpin. Sure it didn’t live past his lifespan. But his lifespan along encompassed countless mortal generations. All empires eventually come to an end and even if his only lasted for his singular generation it’s still outlasted countless others. And for that period of time during which it did exist his people experienced more stability and prosperity than countless other regimes in the wheel have gotten to benefit from.
Just cause it came crashing down in the end doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it for the many mortal generations of lives that it did manage to encompass. But yeah an empire built so firmly around such an integral centralizing figure was unlikely to ever have a chance of handling the transition of power well even under the best circumstances.
Hopefully White Chains new republic and democracy can eventually grow into something vibrant and interesting from the ashes of the old empire. But it’ll undoubtedly have it’s own flaws and without as powerful a stabilizing figure as Solomon I find myself wondering how long it will manage to last compared to the empire. I have zero doubt that the future generations of the democracy will end up parting ways with White Chain long long before the amount of time it took for Solomon to get tired of ruling. And once White Chain is out of the picture in terms of running the show all bets are off in regards to bow long they’ll last before collapsing.
to be fair they also lost the entire administrative capital. That likely included most government records and many of the people who knew what needed doing
This is true. If Solomon had suddenly disappeared during peacetime, rather than the literal multiverse apocalypse, the empire probably would have adapted and lasted a bit longer.
I doubt that very much. But I am hugely amused at how loyally people continue to defend him. Daddy issues rule the multiverse, it seems.
What leads do you doubt it? If anything I was defending the ability of the populace to thrive without Solomon, quite the opposite of defending him.
It’s doubtful his sons would have really accepted an outsider over them… particularly a //female//.
No miso-flavored gyny from me, but either he had no daughters, or they weren’t deemed capable to help him rule as there were none on his council of sons. Sons thus raised, and raised by such sons, over and over and over in this fashion would not have accepted White Chain as their lord and master.
If I remember correctly, (and I might not,) Dave explicitly refused to have daughters as a way of mourning the family he lost way back then (who were all daughters, no sons.) Apparently mastery of Ki Rata also allows you to choose your kids before they’re born.
He punched all the sperm with an X chromosome while in stopped time U_U
Hey, he knows kung fu, he ain’t gotta explain shit
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t see why you’d be so sceptical Vajrachinta. It’s not a question of Solomon’s qualities as a leader. It’s more that Solomon still used a bureaucracy to actually implement his government and a large part of it went up in smoke.
*Any* complex government is going to have a hard time when all the people who know how to run shit disappear. It likely would have been problematic having the capital incinerated even if Solomon were still around.
While it is true, and I’d agree that the Empire might have lasted a bit more (but like a week more), you forget one component of what White Chain is saying : Jagganoth’s army is doing a number on the Republic, yes, but most refugees are here because of the Civil War.
And here lies the biggest problem of Solomon’s Empire : even with the capacity to run flawlessly, if every son of Solomon with a bit of power is trying to claw at the throne, the Empire WILL break almost instantly.
Maybe even because information will circulate quickly and efficently.
Myeah, his sons, while perhaps good rulers in their own right, have lived their entire lives in the shadow of one man above all. When seeing the throne empty the first thing they’ll do is hardly going to be to topple it and set up a ruling council.
I was originally ok with war and destruction and death, but now that the ferret people are involved? Maybe we should set aside our differences and protect those gentle souls.
i figured they were the soup-making cats from that one mobile game. Regardless, both they and their culinary traditions must be preserved
My first thought was Palicos.
L
Apparently the Celestial Empire included the world of Monster Hunter.
I am now picturing Solomon David punching the lights out of an Elder Dragon.
That was my thought too!
Yeah, democracy isn’t a thing you just do after all of that time being under the eye of Solomon.
Which is what he was trying to tell her when she asked for him to abdicate.
You mean he was saying, “Oh but I’ve oppressed people for so long. If I stop they’ll oppress me back. Or each other. Or…how dare you suggest you can build a state that isn’t oppressive? The very idea! It’ll never work, I’ve spend millennia proving it….uh oh here comes Jaggy.”
No, he simply said what she asked was no simple thing, and then the conversation got interrupted. And White Chain lost the war for the city and got everyone slaughtered. (Though not exactly her fault as that was the result of a comic contest)
What comic contest do you mean?
War for Rayuba.
No, we have no idea what he was going to say. It was intentionally obscured. If you return to King of Swords 10-173 he says “what you ask… _an not be ___htly __ant—“. Most likely it’s “can not be rightly/lightly granted.” Both equally possible, both incredibly different answers.
A man may stand on one leg while carrying a great weight and call it impressive.
I call it easily toppled, and tragic for the weight.
So does White Chain have Solomon’s full key now and not an emissary fragment?
Unlikely, I would say. Solomon’s key is probably still locked away inside THE ORB he created when he did the big Jagganoth finisher move.
“Know the fourth syllable of royalty” implies the full key, though White Chain lacks the bearing and grandiose of a Demiurge.
The “i know of the fourth symbol of royalty” has been part of the speech since first introduced though so it doesn’t change anything.
Albeit i only know cause i just started rereading but she uses the exact same introduction she did to allison the first time
Ah. Nice catch.
I think it has changed from knowing “of” the fourth syllable to now outright knowing it. In the same way I know of quantum physics but wouldn’t claim to know it.
She said “know of” on the last page too. It is word for word the same.
Look back to KSBD 2-2
But what is the fourth syllable of royalty? I think it’s “U” – “A continUous cutting motion.” Could depend on pronunciation I guess.
Doesn’t sound like White Chain *got* her wish, more like it had to be carved out in the middle of collapse. So it goes.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa my feels!
I know. I too forgot how short she is!
Wish granted
It could not rightly be granted.
Reports from Rayuba before its destruction suggest Ruin, sword of Jagganoth, was rammed wholly into the world atop a train by a mob of so-called “elephant boys”.
Damn if only there were some kind of collection of comics to document what must have been a very intense battle. With like an interactive day-by-day map. Shucks.
Amazing comment!
No but seriously I haven’t really been following the War for Rayuba arcs. Is there a handy summary or depository I can browse? I’ve only been intermittently following the discord. Please drop links.
https:// docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qcOQ5XtHYM2DvT-_YClxSi5fx7Hbizox1czpGWm1aTA/htmlview#gid=0
https: //cubari.moe/read/gist/JOimE/1/1/
Apparently this is it
83 White Chain Returns With A Step Stool To Subdue Chaos
Just here to say, this comment is amazing and made me laugh out loud.
Byzantine interpretations of the universal interverse standard continue to develop
I’ve always wondered if purple is as expensive and difficult a colour to make in Solomon’s realm, as it was on Earth, because if it was, that would explain a lot about why so much of Solomon’s chosen colour scheme was purple.
Color is often considered the color of pride, which is likely related to it being the color of wealth, which stems from how hard it was to get violet dye!
PURPLE is often considered the color of pride. My word.
Sulaiman Daud is ace like me, hehe. Well, White Chain probably is.
In Solomon’s backstory we see him dressed in purple even when he was just a common soldier. He could of course have been some sort of royal guard but to me that suggest that purple is to Rayuba what Red is to earth.
Curious, does Red have some sort of worldwide meaning on Earth? I’ve never visited.
Red is very easy to make, being derivable from ubiquitous iron oxide, and thus has typically been used in “get the cheapest bright color you can buy, we just need this to be noticeable” applications.
It’s sort of the anti-purple in that way: nearly everyone has access to good, bright red dye.
Very interesting! Thanks for the informative response.
It’s really wonderful to see the contrast between White Chain and Solomon here as the bearer of the word Diamond. Solomon cannot be found with fault or flaw, he must always be perceived as perfect, implacable. We see both Solomon and White Chain engage with laypeople, Solomon when constructing the arena, and while there’s a similar burden borne here, dedication to serving those who lack godliness with a resolute/stalwart energy.
But these last panels show a key difference: that there is a place where White Chain can set aside the performance of leadership and show vulnerability, even privately, that Solomon could not. And critically, that she would CHOOSE to show that.
The King must stand alone. To be invulnerable he must have no weaknesses, and having people he cares about creates a strength and a weakness that can be exploited.
Leadership pushed a relatively good man into a cage and tempered him in cold reality and the demands and expectations of truly countless numbers of people.
The first Abbess of the Fading Flame one spoke a phrase that sundered the proud 344 Kings of Loch-Lomere and crushed the arrogant 56 Emperors of Shasere: “The one who cannot turn his weakness into a sword that can Cut is no true Royalty at all, but merely a Pretender.”
Indeed, the Abbess had no pretensions of maintaining an image of invulnerability to either king or beggar and nor did she care for the demands or expectations of anyone and was therefore Royalty.
we absolutely MUST protect the ferret-palicos at all cost
YES, they have true meowscular chef potential
Really, setting up a democracy under the duress of rapid lost of space and resources has my head spinning. Oof. I’m guessing then White Chain was democratically elected?
I wonder who the other candidates could have been. Solomon’s empire collapsing instantly points to there not being many competent people under him, and even if there were, who wouldn’t vote for an angel who punched god and then fared better than him against the guy currently destroying the universe?
I don’t think it’s a lack of competent people – Rayuba was wealthy and educated, and there were clearly people working hard to keep it running (and prove their worth to Solomon by doing so). But Solomon taught that the only way to become King was through violence, and that’s not really the sort of thing that encourages stable government.
Most likely, every single one of Solomon’s advisors tried to seize the throne as soon as he vanished, and White Chain’s group is everyone who got out of the way of that mess.
Those who were competent and recognised — Rayuba’s ruling class — were in the stadium on the closing day of the Ring of Power. Ashes, all of them, before the question of succession arose.
I mean… Yes, it’s not ideal, but when was White Chains supposed to try and make democracy happen? AFTER the end of the Multiverse?
Honestly, it makes sense that she did it organically : people from the Tournament of Power banded together to fight for Rayuba and their lives, they lost, but White Chains was basically put into the seat of the leader, and she probably insisted that people should decide their fates (having seen during the war that it kind of worked, even if they lost in the end).
She probably also didn’t want to repeat the exact same pattern as Solomon David.
So, yeah, democracy. Which comes with other problems than tyranny, but is still kind of better for what they’re facing here.
White Chains knows she can’t face the Mutiversal War alone, so everyone need to try together.
Is it cheesy? Yes.
Desperate? Of course.
Unrealistic? Certainly not.
WHATS POLITICS I SAW CAT CHEFS
They looked like beavers to me
I thought they were cats too. Several others here seem to think they are ferrets. In any case, they are unbearably winsome and the Omniverse must be saved if only for their sake!
If Allison keeps stopping these sorry if bombs so casualty she might just hit Jagganoth with one strong enough
Don’t come at me with this “the crumbling Republic is but a pale shadow of Salomon David’s Empire” nonsense. We had a good, long look at things under Salomon. How many ferret chefs? Zero. ZERO. THERE WERE NO FERRETS, WHITE CHAIN. In fact, you could say that this so-called Celestial Empire was characterized by a distinct LACK of funny animals doing human things, or wearing little hats.
this person gets it
You make a compelling argument
Democracy truly is worth the struggle *tears up*
MY WIFE
And so the small folk huddle among the ruins of the Empire while Armageddon rages on. Who leads this little republic? How many stalwart souls remain? And, most importantly… from where did the Angel born anew gain such a lovely flame?
How very interesting.
oh my god seeing white chain cry
shes really human she did it
im so happy for her
I *thought* that it had all collapsed. Glorious vindication in this most horrifying of times. Also, it tugs at the heartstrings to see White Chain cry for Al-Yisun. I love them both dearly.
also it makes me so happy to see these two reunited. they’ve been through so much, together and apart.