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At first, I too thot this sounds too good to be true, but now I making this also ridiculous amounts of money, just in spare time, playing moblile games, taking surveys, injecting self with exprimentle phartmacutickles drugs whicth definitelyly not aversly affect me, also this best comic ever
I have achieved Royalty by using the sword at home! I never imagined that I could reach heaven, but it turns out, if you just use violence you can do it in an instant! Please, you must try learning the True Name of God by cutting things!
With profit margins like that it is undoubtable you will dominate all markets real and hypothetical and buy the world itself. Hence the question is: What then?
It will never end of course, your pursuit of profit.
Is there an end to the path of the sword? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps the real answer is somewhere in the middle, revealed only once they are, both of them, dead by one another’s cutting arts.
An interesting contradiction here, and one I think Incubus knows intimately, to declare “It never ends” while standing next to one who seeks an end to all.
A betrayal seems certain if he is not struck down before Jagganoth is freed.
does anyone else think incubus looks like allison in the top right panel? at first allison got white hair like incubus but now his face looks like hers. idk. sorry
Even the most wretches of rabid dogs does not deny its true nature. Which, then, is more wretched – the rabid dog or the old pet who still slavers at the scent of blood?
When Prim finds that The Road has no ending and takes comfort in it, we declare her wise and Royalty. When Incubus does the same, we call him an idiot and a stinky terrible swordsman. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
Nay, this one has not forgotten the lie of the shortstack Jagganoth was shown to be in a book 1 flashback… the Chakravartin ’twas always a large lad. Mayhaps we shall also speak of White Chain’s obscene claim to the slaughter of many key holders?
I think his attachment to Maya is a big sticking point here. He hasn’t shorn himself of desire, he hasn’t accepted the finitude of the world (despite allying with the guy who wants to end it), and as of yet he can’t bring himself to kill her. He knows the road is eternal, but the thing he wants most is someone to walk it alongside him.
36 Ringing Bell Shatters Thieves and Heretics Both
…You have convinced me that Incubus is much closer to Royalty than Maya ever was. He does not yet know that the roads ends in his death, but he has still resolved to walk it for as long as he can. A glorious fool, indeed.
Incubus isn’t close to royalty. He is unable to choose. It has been a flaw of all of the 7. The dragon cannot stop counting, mottom could not stop consuming. The witch in glass sees only rhe fixed future, past and present.
Incubus believes his path has no end and no choice, he must kill and kill and kill and drown in an ocean of blood. A man who believes his path cannlt be altered.
Maya at least understood that the path of the sword only leads to more and more killing
Note that “eyes open/closed” has been a theme through the entire comic, and here Incubus and Maya are both shown as having one eye open and one closed in some panels. Together, they would have both eyes open…or both closed.
I suspect each key is like a coin, it has two sides. One is Demiurge/Vice, the other is Royalty/Virtue. (Or like Yis and Un.)
So far, White Chain is the only one (other than maybe Allison, whose arc isn’t done yet) demonstrating what a key wielded as a virtue rather than a vice might be.
But there might be something here with Incubus/Maya as a duality, fighting over their key, each having half of the answer. I wonder if Maya can get to a point where she’s more like White Chain than Incubus…
Anyway. My point is there’s some artistic symbolism here that suggests they each have part of the answer, but not the whole.
I don’t know if the Road truly ends in death. “Royalty” as a narrative concept seems to me to borrow concepts of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, wherein after death one repeats their own life eternally. It’s as Allison said- if you do not think about death, you will never truly die.
As with all of his fellow demiurges, he possesses a great deal of understanding of one seventh of Royalty, and a complete ignorance of the other six portions.
Is escaping desire necessarily a good thing, though?
As YISUN said to Aesma:
“Struggle is all there is. Want and struggle are the twin essences of existence, and to rest is death.”
The rest of the quote also feels fitting:
“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. For this you are my strongest disciple.”
Good? Not sure that good figures into it at all. Enlightenment isn’t good or evil or anything else. Meti was Royalty and she was a miserable old woman who had devoted her life to a worthless Art and lived in a pot. Zoss is Royalty and he’s trapped in an endless cycle of slavery to Metatron. Hansa was Royalty and he died of lung cancer. Good is immaterial. Royalty is not a measure of virtue, or happiness, or any mortal pursuit, because it cannot be pursued. It can only be attained.
True, I guess what I’m thinking on this is…Royalty is overrated.
I mean, when people pursue Royalty, what are they going for?
It isn’t necessarily morally good: Maya believes that Meti is Royalty, and Meti advocated for letting a child starve to death. (And Hansa wasn’t exactly kind to Prim)
It isn’t an insurmountable strength: Gog-Agog claims to have nearly surpassed Zoss in the first cycle, despite Zoss seemingly being Royalty and Gog-Agog being confirmed not to be.
It doesn’t make someone always correct, either: Zoss wondered at Yre if making Allison his heir was a mistake, so, he must be able to make mistakes.
And it isn’t necessarily favoured by YISUN’s opinion: Aesma seems to be the antithesis of what’s been written about Royalty, (she’s usually defined by want and struggle) and is told by YISUN “You are a liar, and you have a mind of boiling wicked schemes, and for this you are my favoured daughter.”
(So conversely, desire isn’t necessarily evil, a weakness, or foolish, and YISUN seems to encourage it)
I’m not denying that Incubus’ desires hold him back from Royalty.
But I don’t think that that makes him an “idiot stinky terrible swordsman”, either. (If anything makes him stinky, it’s sanitary issues at Lethyx!)
And I feel like, most obviously with Maya claiming that “Meti was never wrong. She was Royalty, and lived in a perfect state of liberation”, there’s a tendency for Royalty to be falsely invoked as an appeal to authority.
Incubis and Maya are siblings, and both were trained by Meti, the sword-poisoned fool. They are both deeply flawed people, and we shouldn’t believe Maya when she says that Incubus didn’t understand Meti’s teachings. They each took different approaches to the wisdom they were granted, and they’re both fools for listening in the first place.
I love Maya. She lies- to herself, to her students, she’s deeply ashamed of herself and the life she’s lived. She says he killed her master and fed her body to dogs, frames it as a reason for revenge, or at least a reason to hate him. But it was her that did that.
And the more she fights incubus, the more enraged and exhausted she becomes. She says a competent sword fighter only makes one cut, and just thirty seconds later he’s in 8 different pieces.
She seems to project much of herself and her shame onto him, and then seeks to destroy it – and perhaps in destroying him she’ll destroy herself. I don’t know. It’s fascinating.
Amazing plot twist that Icubus genuinely loves his sister Maya and always has. I’m starting to think that when Maya calls Incubus a poor swordsman, she doesn’t mean that he can’t kill her, she means that he keeps refusing to. All this time he has been sparing her life and she can only hate him for it.
It’s always been extremely noticeable how frantically she insists that Meti only had/meant to take one student. Especially given that Maya refused to cut her hair until after Incubus did.
Exactly. Incubus has never slain Maya, because he does not want to. Remember when he threw Meti’s body to the dogs? Just like Meti had suggested, in an off-hand comment, decades ago. Incubus cared deeply for his master, for his sister, and took their words and lessons to heart. This is the result.
Maya’s words here are no different from Meti’s harsh language to Incubus, and its always been him and her vs. the world. She’s just going through a rough patch. Master’s last lesson was a bit of a trick question, and she was always getting confused by even the simplest of Meti’s instructions. Not the brightest swordswomen, but she’s still family.
His comments here also reflect a truth he knew from the very start, because for him the sword was always about survival. While Maya took it up because noodle vendor sounded boring and somehow only blanched when she realised she had to fight forever.
Incubus seems to know the answer. The road is without end. I’m really enjoying how much depth this fight has given him, it’s the summit of his philosophy.
I don’t know if he truly wants Royalty. I think he might just want his sister back, and he’d be willing to let her take the throne for it. Everything he’s ever done has been to drive her back onto the path of the Sword.
If he wanted it, he would surely never attain it. Desire for Royalty is not just irrelevant, it is prohibitive. Still, his attachment to Maya might be keeping him a bit too grounded. Even if he can resolve the paradox of violence, he still clings to her, he still wants to save her in his own way. Incubus knows the road is eternal, but he believes he needs a companion.
Because Incubus is not a man or a king, but a simple dog. He is and always has been nothing more than a loyal hound, guarding an empty throne as he waits for his master to return. He’s like Hachiko, the loyal dog who waited every day for his dead master for ten years.
…But she never even looks at him, no matter how much he screams and howls at her. She doesn’t understand that she’s been his entire world ever since she picked him off the streets so many years ago.
Incubus cannot ever attain Royalty because he can never stop yearning for his sister’s return. Hell, he even tried to turn Allison into a replacement Maya.
Honestly, Incubus is making more and more of a point every week. I understand why Maya won’t forgive him- he killed her family- but he does truly seem to understand the gravity of his actions and genuinely want her back. I’m hoping that once Jagganoth comes out they put aside their differences and kill the Red God.
Which does make her something of a hypocrite. How many families, hundreds of thousands and likely many, MANY more entire families did she butcher, did she slaughter, did she massacre as a demiurge? And she has the gall to be furious with him. She’s a CONSUMMATE liar and hypocrite, look at her now, practically foaming at the mouth with fury that he understands Meti’s question, he understands exactly what Prim came to understand and Maya never could: it never ends. The road keeps going. Even if you die upon it, the road is forever.
Unless Jagganoth manages to win and utterly obliterate the wheel and reality, of course, but Zoss hasn’t allowed that.
Well, quite- but a ‘major part’ most readers, at least judging by the comments under these comics, either miss or willingly overlook to keep up the ‘Maya’s so badass’ ‘go queen’ etc head-canon narratives they’ve formed. Maya’s a fucking mess. We’ll see if she makes it out of this despite that. Not sure she SHOULD, to be honest.
When Maya is confronted with the fact that the road never ends, she runs away from it and renounces her power rather than acknowledge that truth.
When Solomon David was faced with it, he tried to force it to end — to stop the churning of the wheel of history — until all he was protecting was destroyed by Jagganoth, and he gave up on power.
Mottom similarly sought an end, trying to make Allison take her power — and found a sense of relief in her death.
And of course, Gog-Agog went into nihilism.
Prim was terrified and desperate when she saw no end to the road, but felt comfort when it was confirmed that the road has no end. (Well, it does, but neither ending she came across appealed to her more than the infinity ahead of her)
While Incubus…seems to have been in a state of acceptance from the start. We know that Maya’s retelling of her last meeting with Meti contained a lie, it didn’t show Meti’s death — but if Incubus’ reaction was still accurate, he looked more concerned by Maya running away than by what Meti had said. Maybe he’d already come to this conclusion.
Probably back when he was a child. His expression before cutting his hair with a sword looked both scared and ecstatic at once, like knowing it was the first step of the road he wanted to follow — yet still aware of how difficult it would be. Like he already knew he was at the point of no return before great (in this case, unending) hardship.
Is that what was meant by “it beggared belief that such a man had emerged in this world anything other than fully formed”?
This fact has been staring everyone in the face from the start, though.
“Let there be no genesis, for beginnings are false and I am a consummate liar”, and for a wheel — a cycle — there is no difference between an end and beginning.
So, I guess the main unanswered question about Incubus’ mindset now is…if there is no end, what does it mean to “win”?
Is it like a roguelike, where the existence of an endless mode doesn’t invalidate a win achieved before that point? Even then, what’s the win condition?
Winning is a process. All Incubus ever was, was a survivor. As long as you’re alive, you’re winning. Sure, the road is endless and, at one point, *you* will end, while the road continues on… but until that time, it’s one foot in front of the other.
Incubus doesn’t really crave power for its sake, or to rule anything. He probably doesn’t even care much for pleasure. He’s just… going on, and being a powerful demiurge was the best way to ensure his survival. In a way, he is his own mouse. It seems that the connection to his ‘sister’ is the only other thing he ever cared about.
I’m not sure about that, I think he sees winning as something separate from surviving.
After all, Allison made it clear that she does — “I don’t want to win. I just want to survive” — and Incubus’ response, rather than clarifying that survival would be the same thing as winning, said “You remind me of an old friend of mine. She, like you, was wrong. It’s only about winning”.
I feel like that establishes winning as something separate (and more important than) survival, in his eyes.
Or, alternatively, if Incubus sees the two as being one and the same, denying that — saying you *don’t* want to ‘win’ but to ‘survive’ — is a self-contradictory and inherently wrong statement.
If it’s *only* about winning and all of existence is a Red Queen’s race to butcher your way to the top, you could no more ‘survive’ without victory than you could ‘survive’ without air. Maya was wrong to seek survival without victory, and so was Alison.
Meti’s proscriptions taught Incubus that existence itself and the act of combat are both, in essence, a singular Act of Cutting Down Your Opponent. As with the teaching of the rat, Meti’s proscribed action eludes him, but the philosophy behind did not, misapplied though it may be.
Don’t forget Incubus’ own history as an orphaned child of famine.
Even as a god of the seven part world, his philosophy has never changed. Every bite of food has to be taken from everyone else who wants to take it. Anything you manage to take, there is someone who wants to take it from you if you let them. It never relents and it never stops.
Alas, the path of the noodle vendor had a clear ending.
Has it? How many noodles sold is enough noodle to reach the end of the path?
Sell Six Billion Noodles
Such a goal I can support.
I will happily lend a hand, and my bowl and chopsticks, in aid of such a mission.
Perhaps the Pastafarian angle to the K6BD pantheon? 🤔
Royalty is one continuous noodle-pulling motion.
The great noodle master makes only one noodle
One does not simply consume the infininoodle in one continuous slurping motion.
EAT SIX BILLION NOODLES
Before you can sell noodles, you must strike down god before it strikes you down.
The path of noodles has just one noodle. It is the idiot’s noodle, and it stretches to the horizon.
maybe.
Perhaps the real challenge of the Noodling Path is ‘Enjoy noodles with friends.”
It may not win battles, but, really, how many delicious meals with fast friends has Incubus ever had?
I am making $100,000,000,000 an hour working from home! I never imagined that i could make so much fucking money from playing mobile games but turns out, if you just listen to , you too can have a communion with ! Please, you must try this job now by just using this website.. please.. please please plaese pelase please paelad plaese PLEASE PELASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE
At first, I too thot this sounds too good to be true, but now I making this also ridiculous amounts of money, just in spare time, playing moblile games, taking surveys, injecting self with exprimentle phartmacutickles drugs whicth definitelyly not aversly affect me, also this best comic ever
I have achieved Royalty by using the sword at home! I never imagined that I could reach heaven, but it turns out, if you just use violence you can do it in an instant! Please, you must try learning the True Name of God by cutting things!
I made millions by swallowing this one worm!
With profit margins like that it is undoubtable you will dominate all markets real and hypothetical and buy the world itself. Hence the question is: What then?
It will never end of course, your pursuit of profit.
seeing inky look almost solemn here is distressing
I know. I’m worried about Maya TT_TT
Is there an end to the path of the sword? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps the real answer is somewhere in the middle, revealed only once they are, both of them, dead by one another’s cutting arts.
The real answer is somewhere in the noodle
Much like Prim and the Road, there is never any end. Only the Wheel, turning endlessly.
the end of the path of the sword is where you stop swinging it
It’s about the friends we cut along the way.
Which only gives us twice as many friends!
The sword will only stop cutting when it is broken. Other than that, anything is merely a temporary reprieve.
Even the shards of a broken sword can cut again.
I think the term you are looking for is not “perhaps” but instead maybe.
What an unbelievable first panel. Truly gorgeous art
The “impact” transition, A++++
I don’t know how but I mistakenly read “first” as “last” and thought you were talking about the last panel my b
either way both are good beautiful page
An interesting contradiction here, and one I think Incubus knows intimately, to declare “It never ends” while standing next to one who seeks an end to all.
A betrayal seems certain if he is not struck down before Jagganoth is freed.
Except even that isn’t the end because the Wheel just keeps on rolling…
Jagganoth wishes to destroy the wheel and everyone who dwells within it, so it may stop turning, silly.
everybodys having climactic showdowns with their narrative foils, and allisons off having worm time
does anyone else think incubus looks like allison in the top right panel? at first allison got white hair like incubus but now his face looks like hers. idk. sorry
Even the most wretches of rabid dogs does not deny its true nature. Which, then, is more wretched – the rabid dog or the old pet who still slavers at the scent of blood?
go white chain! crack that repressed angel’s egg!!!!!!!
“A relative of some sort, he was fond of saying” We saw how he grew up, that guy has no biological family he’d know the name of. It was her name 🙁
And here we see that Incubus, unlike Auntie Maya, can answer Meti’s riddle. He can resolve the paradox of violence.
It’s not an answer that a lot of people would like, but it is consistent and it is actionable.
He knows what he is and what that means.
How interesting, then, that this may be interpreted as a declaration he believes he lacks the ability to choose his own fate.
yessss that’s exactly it. It’s a bad answer. But its the correct one.
There’s no idealistic way out, there’s no absolution from it.
Very interesting things going on here, what with Incubus being technically correct in this story where god loves a fool.
I’m starting to think Incubus and Jadis have a lot in common.
Always remember, technically correct is YISUN’s favorite form of correct.
The path ends at the edge of the sword. So unless you have a very long sword it’s a tragically short path.
Now suppose someone used a sword with no edge.
A particularily pointy rock
When Prim finds that The Road has no ending and takes comfort in it, we declare her wise and Royalty. When Incubus does the same, we call him an idiot and a stinky terrible swordsman. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
Contradictions? In MY kill six billion demons!?
It’s more likely than you think…
Yttr Am!
Nay, this one has not forgotten the lie of the shortstack Jagganoth was shown to be in a book 1 flashback… the Chakravartin ’twas always a large lad. Mayhaps we shall also speak of White Chain’s obscene claim to the slaughter of many key holders?
Well, only one among Maya and Incubus holds a Throne.
I think his attachment to Maya is a big sticking point here. He hasn’t shorn himself of desire, he hasn’t accepted the finitude of the world (despite allying with the guy who wants to end it), and as of yet he can’t bring himself to kill her. He knows the road is eternal, but the thing he wants most is someone to walk it alongside him.
…You have convinced me that Incubus is much closer to Royalty than Maya ever was. He does not yet know that the roads ends in his death, but he has still resolved to walk it for as long as he can. A glorious fool, indeed.
Incubus isn’t close to royalty. He is unable to choose. It has been a flaw of all of the 7. The dragon cannot stop counting, mottom could not stop consuming. The witch in glass sees only rhe fixed future, past and present.
Incubus believes his path has no end and no choice, he must kill and kill and kill and drown in an ocean of blood. A man who believes his path cannlt be altered.
Maya at least understood that the path of the sword only leads to more and more killing
Note that “eyes open/closed” has been a theme through the entire comic, and here Incubus and Maya are both shown as having one eye open and one closed in some panels. Together, they would have both eyes open…or both closed.
I suspect each key is like a coin, it has two sides. One is Demiurge/Vice, the other is Royalty/Virtue. (Or like Yis and Un.)
So far, White Chain is the only one (other than maybe Allison, whose arc isn’t done yet) demonstrating what a key wielded as a virtue rather than a vice might be.
But there might be something here with Incubus/Maya as a duality, fighting over their key, each having half of the answer. I wonder if Maya can get to a point where she’s more like White Chain than Incubus…
Anyway. My point is there’s some artistic symbolism here that suggests they each have part of the answer, but not the whole.
I don’t know if the Road truly ends in death. “Royalty” as a narrative concept seems to me to borrow concepts of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, wherein after death one repeats their own life eternally. It’s as Allison said- if you do not think about death, you will never truly die.
As with all of his fellow demiurges, he possesses a great deal of understanding of one seventh of Royalty, and a complete ignorance of the other six portions.
Is escaping desire necessarily a good thing, though?
As YISUN said to Aesma:
“Struggle is all there is. Want and struggle are the twin essences of existence, and to rest is death.”
The rest of the quote also feels fitting:
“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. For this you are my strongest disciple.”
Good? Not sure that good figures into it at all. Enlightenment isn’t good or evil or anything else. Meti was Royalty and she was a miserable old woman who had devoted her life to a worthless Art and lived in a pot. Zoss is Royalty and he’s trapped in an endless cycle of slavery to Metatron. Hansa was Royalty and he died of lung cancer. Good is immaterial. Royalty is not a measure of virtue, or happiness, or any mortal pursuit, because it cannot be pursued. It can only be attained.
True, I guess what I’m thinking on this is…Royalty is overrated.
I mean, when people pursue Royalty, what are they going for?
It isn’t necessarily morally good: Maya believes that Meti is Royalty, and Meti advocated for letting a child starve to death. (And Hansa wasn’t exactly kind to Prim)
It isn’t an insurmountable strength: Gog-Agog claims to have nearly surpassed Zoss in the first cycle, despite Zoss seemingly being Royalty and Gog-Agog being confirmed not to be.
It doesn’t make someone always correct, either: Zoss wondered at Yre if making Allison his heir was a mistake, so, he must be able to make mistakes.
And it isn’t necessarily favoured by YISUN’s opinion: Aesma seems to be the antithesis of what’s been written about Royalty, (she’s usually defined by want and struggle) and is told by YISUN “You are a liar, and you have a mind of boiling wicked schemes, and for this you are my favoured daughter.”
(So conversely, desire isn’t necessarily evil, a weakness, or foolish, and YISUN seems to encourage it)
I’m not denying that Incubus’ desires hold him back from Royalty.
But I don’t think that that makes him an “idiot stinky terrible swordsman”, either. (If anything makes him stinky, it’s sanitary issues at Lethyx!)
And I feel like, most obviously with Maya claiming that “Meti was never wrong. She was Royalty, and lived in a perfect state of liberation”, there’s a tendency for Royalty to be falsely invoked as an appeal to authority.
This is wonderful insight. Thanks for it.
Incubis and Maya are siblings, and both were trained by Meti, the sword-poisoned fool. They are both deeply flawed people, and we shouldn’t believe Maya when she says that Incubus didn’t understand Meti’s teachings. They each took different approaches to the wisdom they were granted, and they’re both fools for listening in the first place.
I love Maya. She lies- to herself, to her students, she’s deeply ashamed of herself and the life she’s lived. She says he killed her master and fed her body to dogs, frames it as a reason for revenge, or at least a reason to hate him. But it was her that did that.
And the more she fights incubus, the more enraged and exhausted she becomes. She says a competent sword fighter only makes one cut, and just thirty seconds later he’s in 8 different pieces.
She seems to project much of herself and her shame onto him, and then seeks to destroy it – and perhaps in destroying him she’ll destroy herself. I don’t know. It’s fascinating.
He killed her children. I would assume she just didn’t want to talk about that.
I think you’re spot on with the projection and denial, but she also hates him for what he’s done.
The path of the sword always ends on the end of another sword.
Oh, that sounds like a real treat, can you imagine all the swords you’d see along the way? Probably more than ten. That’s amazing
Amazing plot twist that Icubus genuinely loves his sister Maya and always has. I’m starting to think that when Maya calls Incubus a poor swordsman, she doesn’t mean that he can’t kill her, she means that he keeps refusing to. All this time he has been sparing her life and she can only hate him for it.
It’s always been extremely noticeable how frantically she insists that Meti only had/meant to take one student. Especially given that Maya refused to cut her hair until after Incubus did.
Exactly. Incubus has never slain Maya, because he does not want to. Remember when he threw Meti’s body to the dogs? Just like Meti had suggested, in an off-hand comment, decades ago. Incubus cared deeply for his master, for his sister, and took their words and lessons to heart. This is the result.
Maya’s words here are no different from Meti’s harsh language to Incubus, and its always been him and her vs. the world. She’s just going through a rough patch. Master’s last lesson was a bit of a trick question, and she was always getting confused by even the simplest of Meti’s instructions. Not the brightest swordswomen, but she’s still family.
His comments here also reflect a truth he knew from the very start, because for him the sword was always about survival. While Maya took it up because noodle vendor sounded boring and somehow only blanched when she realised she had to fight forever.
Anyway, becoming a thousand treatos for dogs would be my preferred form of post mortem garbage disposal.
Now this is the self-assured and low-key sexy incubus I’ve been wanting back ever since book three! Truly perhaps he was never gone
Speak for yourself, I find half-skinned and noseless Incubus in Book 5 the sexiest he’s ever been
He did have an aura about him then too didnt he indeed
I’m just now noticing that Incubus’s blood arms are very similar in appearance to Juggernaut Star and the other Thorn Knights’ armor.
Incubus should know that all things end, except maybe Zoss.
On the Wheel, nothing ends, it simply becomes something else.
Incubus seems to know the answer. The road is without end. I’m really enjoying how much depth this fight has given him, it’s the summit of his philosophy.
I do wonder what’s keeping him from Royalty.
I don’t know if he truly wants Royalty. I think he might just want his sister back, and he’d be willing to let her take the throne for it. Everything he’s ever done has been to drive her back onto the path of the Sword.
If he wanted it, he would surely never attain it. Desire for Royalty is not just irrelevant, it is prohibitive. Still, his attachment to Maya might be keeping him a bit too grounded. Even if he can resolve the paradox of violence, he still clings to her, he still wants to save her in his own way. Incubus knows the road is eternal, but he believes he needs a companion.
Because Incubus is not a man or a king, but a simple dog. He is and always has been nothing more than a loyal hound, guarding an empty throne as he waits for his master to return. He’s like Hachiko, the loyal dog who waited every day for his dead master for ten years.
…But she never even looks at him, no matter how much he screams and howls at her. She doesn’t understand that she’s been his entire world ever since she picked him off the streets so many years ago.
Incubus cannot ever attain Royalty because he can never stop yearning for his sister’s return. Hell, he even tried to turn Allison into a replacement Maya.
Maybe all this has been is Maya hoping she can make herself annoying enough for Incubus to kill her, no matter how much he still misses her.
Honestly, Incubus is making more and more of a point every week. I understand why Maya won’t forgive him- he killed her family- but he does truly seem to understand the gravity of his actions and genuinely want her back. I’m hoping that once Jagganoth comes out they put aside their differences and kill the Red God.
Which does make her something of a hypocrite. How many families, hundreds of thousands and likely many, MANY more entire families did she butcher, did she slaughter, did she massacre as a demiurge? And she has the gall to be furious with him. She’s a CONSUMMATE liar and hypocrite, look at her now, practically foaming at the mouth with fury that he understands Meti’s question, he understands exactly what Prim came to understand and Maya never could: it never ends. The road keeps going. Even if you die upon it, the road is forever.
Unless Jagganoth manages to win and utterly obliterate the wheel and reality, of course, but Zoss hasn’t allowed that.
Well, yes. Of course she’s a hypocrite. Incubus explicitly calls that out, it’s a major part of her character.
Well, quite- but a ‘major part’ most readers, at least judging by the comments under these comics, either miss or willingly overlook to keep up the ‘Maya’s so badass’ ‘go queen’ etc head-canon narratives they’ve formed. Maya’s a fucking mess. We’ll see if she makes it out of this despite that. Not sure she SHOULD, to be honest.
Will Juggernaut ever remember how to be happy? Will she ever stop being so spikey?(physically and emotionally)
This is all rather confusing
When Maya is confronted with the fact that the road never ends, she runs away from it and renounces her power rather than acknowledge that truth.
When Solomon David was faced with it, he tried to force it to end — to stop the churning of the wheel of history — until all he was protecting was destroyed by Jagganoth, and he gave up on power.
Mottom similarly sought an end, trying to make Allison take her power — and found a sense of relief in her death.
And of course, Gog-Agog went into nihilism.
Prim was terrified and desperate when she saw no end to the road, but felt comfort when it was confirmed that the road has no end. (Well, it does, but neither ending she came across appealed to her more than the infinity ahead of her)
While Incubus…seems to have been in a state of acceptance from the start. We know that Maya’s retelling of her last meeting with Meti contained a lie, it didn’t show Meti’s death — but if Incubus’ reaction was still accurate, he looked more concerned by Maya running away than by what Meti had said. Maybe he’d already come to this conclusion.
Probably back when he was a child. His expression before cutting his hair with a sword looked both scared and ecstatic at once, like knowing it was the first step of the road he wanted to follow — yet still aware of how difficult it would be. Like he already knew he was at the point of no return before great (in this case, unending) hardship.
Is that what was meant by “it beggared belief that such a man had emerged in this world anything other than fully formed”?
This fact has been staring everyone in the face from the start, though.
“Let there be no genesis, for beginnings are false and I am a consummate liar”, and for a wheel — a cycle — there is no difference between an end and beginning.
So, I guess the main unanswered question about Incubus’ mindset now is…if there is no end, what does it mean to “win”?
Is it like a roguelike, where the existence of an endless mode doesn’t invalidate a win achieved before that point? Even then, what’s the win condition?
Winning is a process. All Incubus ever was, was a survivor. As long as you’re alive, you’re winning. Sure, the road is endless and, at one point, *you* will end, while the road continues on… but until that time, it’s one foot in front of the other.
Incubus doesn’t really crave power for its sake, or to rule anything. He probably doesn’t even care much for pleasure. He’s just… going on, and being a powerful demiurge was the best way to ensure his survival. In a way, he is his own mouse. It seems that the connection to his ‘sister’ is the only other thing he ever cared about.
I’m not sure about that, I think he sees winning as something separate from surviving.
After all, Allison made it clear that she does — “I don’t want to win. I just want to survive” — and Incubus’ response, rather than clarifying that survival would be the same thing as winning, said “You remind me of an old friend of mine. She, like you, was wrong. It’s only about winning”.
I feel like that establishes winning as something separate (and more important than) survival, in his eyes.
Or, alternatively, if Incubus sees the two as being one and the same, denying that — saying you *don’t* want to ‘win’ but to ‘survive’ — is a self-contradictory and inherently wrong statement.
If it’s *only* about winning and all of existence is a Red Queen’s race to butcher your way to the top, you could no more ‘survive’ without victory than you could ‘survive’ without air. Maya was wrong to seek survival without victory, and so was Alison.
Meti’s proscriptions taught Incubus that existence itself and the act of combat are both, in essence, a singular Act of Cutting Down Your Opponent. As with the teaching of the rat, Meti’s proscribed action eludes him, but the philosophy behind did not, misapplied though it may be.
Don’t forget Incubus’ own history as an orphaned child of famine.
Even as a god of the seven part world, his philosophy has never changed. Every bite of food has to be taken from everyone else who wants to take it. Anything you manage to take, there is someone who wants to take it from you if you let them. It never relents and it never stops.
stupid sexy Incubus