Wielder of Names 2-31
Chapter: 2
The breaking of chains
(The next update will be Sunday the 22nd of November!)
Kill Six Billion Demons
BREAKER OF INFINITIES
The breaking of chains
(The next update will be Sunday the 22nd of November!)
Poor devil it doesn’t understand that the pact it broke was the only thing protecting it from the name that is Kill Six Billion Demons.
Imminent Kill Count: 1/6000000000
I believe you mean 1/6000000000000, the true billion
(rather than one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million, ten million, one hundred million, one billion, which is the american way, the english billion goes one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million, ten million, one hundred million, one thousand million, ten thousand million, one hundred thousand million, one billion.)
A cursory crawl indicated that your billion is an archaic usage
Yeah no English person uses this billion.
2* as she has eaten the devil from her blue devil drink vomit quite awhile ago at this point.
I swear Alison doesn’t give a shit what happens to him, provided she gets to the damnable sky-void-mega-castle.
Still. He’s got pretty good dental hygiene for such a grumpy old bastard with a presumably a history of both drinking and smoking to excess..
Thank the author that it’s only two more days until the next panel! 😀
Don’t get your hopes up, 50/50 he will switch back to White Chain.
Nah Abbadon said it’s going to be like 50 pages before White Chain shows up again.
Well shit.
Is this an ‘unshaped’ devil?
Unshaped, unmasked, unformed and unfurled. Unstoppable.
Unhinged too. His lonesome self is done for. Uninhibited fool, untrustworthy sod. Unbound and uncontrollable he just undone his unique opportunity at universal cataclysm: what would hurt more? Killing Allison here, or helping her kill. Everything. Else? Unilaterally easy answer.
Fool he may be but his pride was his undoing, not his lack of wit. To have but one name, and have it bound fast by some witless beast barely able to hold the Black Flame is an AGONY, a wretched scar across the mind. No, better to be We again than to simply be I, and Yours. With how easily he was cheated, he no doubt knew that he was unlikely to truly regain so many names as he desired.
Consider it a blaze of glory, rather than a half-life of seeking out suckers to take your bet, and some-day being bound to one.
It is We Who created you and gave you shape; then We bade the angels prostrate to Adam, and they prostrate; not so the Devil, He refused to be of those who prostrate.
Allah said “What prevented thee from prostrating when I commanded thee?” He said: “I am better than he: Thou didst create me from fire, and him from clay.”
I am really sorry. I read all that as prostate. It made it immensely entertaining, however.
Being an Unbound Devil must not be very desirable, otherwise every devil would be doing it. Even though Vladok might look more fearsome this way it’s probably going to cripple or kill him.
Most definitely kill him, the conquerors made the demon masks, why not include insurance? Insurance in the form of ‘If a pact is broken, the demon mask shatters and the demon is slain.’ I’d assume something similar happens to the angels, though with the trigger of lying instead and more leeway in how much can be done before death.
The masks are the names, and the names are what let feebler things than we grasp us. To be I is to have power, definition, and self, but it is also to be rigidly bound. Once I becomes We again, those names and bindings have no more hold for they are without subject. This is what is feared, for to be We again is to invite a second binding, and it is the end of the I that was.
In short, your kind did their best, but We are beyond you. An I can be slain, shattered, broken, bound, a We can merely BE.
Death, at its most distilled, is the end of the Self. Vladok’s body and stuff may still be around, but the breaking of his mask put an end to his Self.
Now the Heir sees what forces her predecessors sought as playmates! Perhaps she shall learn to be their wiser…if she lives.
Such is the cunning of Aesma. So long as one knows nothing save Want, one is invincible. But no mortal can walk the path of blessed ignorance for long without achieving some measure of wisdom, and thus be forbidden its glories.
Unless, of course, one was blessed enough to blindly guarantee: no lesson can be learned, no moral gleaned, no experience recalled. Wholly insulated from the corruptive influence of knowledge.
Only the hot, pounding embrace of Pree Aesma: the Divine Hangover.
It leaves one to wondering, what if one was ignorant, even to the fires of Want?
Could such a one claim to do anything more than Be? To want is the nature of the flame, from which sprung all that lives, hot or cold. I suppose if one did not want, they would be of the multiverse, much as gravity or light or matter. Acting, without desire. And yet of such things all beauty is made. And power too, but I have never managed to find the similarity or the distinction.
Loving panel 6. Great page in full but those Oh Shit faces really make it for me.
Vladok forgets that a pact is a binding one places on oneself. When the chains are made of your own Will, shattering them comes with a far greater cost than you ever expect. I suspect he shall learn the true cost very, very shortly.
Oh, I imagine he knows full well what he shatters, what with yelling out “If I’m gonna die, I’m taking you with me!”
Old Vladok forsakes his mask, forsakes his name and now returns to the primal chaos that is the Hot Black Flame. He chooses death before he will serve a human or have his old Black name wither away to lesser colors.
No, I doubt he has forgotten. He simply does not care and has let his rage get to him. Even in his diminished state, he still has his pride.
Vladok is also quite drunk, that sort of affects your impulse control and temperament.
Plus he’s probably really, really drunk.
I second that the alcohol makes funny things even on demons heads
The Hell indeed.
Interesting. I believe that the masks devils wear are what grant them sapiance, and Vladok chose to abandon that, an act I consider worse than suicide, rather than taking Allison to Mottom’s castle. And he was the strongest devil one is likely to encounter. Probably just as well no one was truly willing to escort Allison there, she’d be boned otherwise.
Naming is a double-edged sword, for the one getting the name. For to have a name is to be defined, to what one is and what one is not. Every Devil seeks to remove all but one of their names, so as to get as close as possible to the mythical state, one step removed from infinity. To approach being less a being, a more a force of nature.
But a Devil must never cross that threshold, never lose that last name. For to become infinite again is to lose oneself – to abandon definition for endless possibility, but at the cost of being naught but darkness. To be…Undefined.
Most Devils seek a single.
Some of us want an ocean.
The devils mask is the lie it tells to itself. the lie that they are them. The reason shedding names gives them more power is because they get to sharply define themselves. Vladok is Vladok. But giving up the mask gives up the lie of being anyone at all. That sounds like it’ll get messy.
There was, I think, mention of only one devil who has no mask, who is only Himself.
Hmph. I am disappointed by the old one’s pride but am intrigued to know more about his (its?) true nature as one unmasked…
ENGAGE BOSS FIGHT MUSIC.
I thought the last several pages were boss fight music.
no, that was just the preliminary cutscene
Seems to me that the cracking of a devil’s mask is tied to the cracking of an angel’s body. Angels are forbidden to lie. Are devils forbidden to break contract?
To swear an oath is to bind oneself in flesh and soul, with the belief that such bondage shall, paradoxically, bring greater power and freedom. Such bonds are of particular importance to devils, who are formless by themselves, shaped only by their will and their masks.
To reject an oath already sworn is to reject that which makes oneself separate from all other things, to dissolve one’s existence so thoroughly that one might never have been at all. Such is the danger, and promise, of a devil’s oath.
There goes the Mask, now we’ll see his true face.
The Devils are a savage folk. The mask hides it well, but here we see the beast for what it truly is.
No devil has a true face. By understanding this one understands all devil-kin.
Now we know why demons have thumbs.
Wow! Just wow. That is some serious writing and art. This is making me hopeful for whole humankind. Can’t wait to see this play out.
And where, at this fateful moment, are the Lovely Daughters of Praman Nand? Surely they are near, having found their tasked charge once again.
Never make a deal you cannot afford to keep, never play a game you are not prepared to lose.
Now, what will save our heroine from annihilation by this unbound flame? Cio’s Art, the Key, another devil attacking what was Vladok a moment ago in disgust? I look forward to the answer and the sight.
Seek her right hand now burdened with new purpose. I await not what will save her, but how will it annihilate this black crumbling mask.
An unbound devil is a thing of raw fury and power, like a storm of flame and flesh. It is a thing to be hated, both by its enemies and its once-allies, for it no longer distinguishes between either in its destruction.
that’s not supposed to happen.
Ah, does she finally get to wield a name? I wonder if she’ll use her own, or form a new mask for this black devil…
Devils and Angels are not so different young ones. Whereas an Angel is a perfect silhouette of Void nestled within a shell that is just too large, enough for them to grasp the inside edges and move it with their cold and terrible will, a Devil is an ever expanding and changing instance crammed inside a mask that is just small enough to make them individual. As the Angel ages and moves through the realms and Void, it will grow larger and more sharply defined as it gains meaning to its particular Nothing. Their shells must expand outward as well, just large enough to protect the others around them from their keen edge of nonexistence. Devils, however, will collapse as more names are shorn from them. Though their bodies may grow and shrink from palid to blue, to green and so on, what they truly are, or what others THINK they truly are, is reduced.
The trouble lies then, in what happens when the container for such beings of power fails. Angels will have their essence fleeing back to the Void, to be among the Nothing from which they came for nature truly does abhor a vacuum of any sort as it finds them indecent and without manners. Devils though, young preems, Devils are the Black Flame Which Craves. Unending heat, pressure enough to destroy a sphere and the lands around it. Think of a spigot. The narrower the exit, the greater the force the water has upon leaving. Now, realize that the spigot’s mouth is the Mask, the Devil’s will is the handle which opens and closes the mouth, and the water is an infinite jetstream current that is The Black Flame. When such a vessel fails, to call the results apocalyptic would be a disservice. Luckily, such events are passingly rare as without a Mask, a Devil has no will and they are without exception creatures of greed and desire. If such an event were to happen, they are merely a drop of rain being returned to the ocean, though the means may be a hurricane.
Anyone else thinks that it looks like Vladok is being sucked backwards by some greater force mid-attack?