Ælf-Adal - VotE Remastered Development

Their Origins in Dream

They come from out of Nightmare, though whose, or why, no-one remembers now. They may have been the dying dream of a coma-locked god, that cracked its sleeping skull and clambered out into our world. They may have been a shadow in the deep dark mirror-world of man, the fearful place we go to in our frightened dreams, brought forth by art, or chance or ancient science.

But they spring from the ecology of dreams, they are born from its substance, made to feed and feed upon and fight those visions of our fear.

Imagine a world composed only of the nightmares of all the thinking, sleeping minds, a strand of hallucinatory darkness shifting in its substance as dreamers wake and sleepers slip in and out of terror in the night. A world where the only stability comes from the mass memories of shared catastrophes. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. A world where predation is absolute, where all things hunt and kill and there is nothing that does not, in some small way, do harm. A world whose demiurges and creating gods, those beings that fill it with their life, who imbue its every moment with their black creative fire, are also its victims, targets and foes. A world that hates its creators.

This is the world of the Ælf-Adal, where they slowly grew, shaping themselves from the coagulated stuff of thought. This is where they first formed independent minds, where they made their society, where they built their mighty civilisation, a city seen in many dreams but never recognised.

How long they lay there thinking dreaming thoughts, nobody knows. Some say longer than the life of man, some say longer than the life of the world, some say longer than the stars.

Their War Against the Dreamers

No-one is certain who declared the war, whether their psychonaut scouts broke out, hunting dreamers as they woke, unwilling to let go, even on the borders of night, or whether some psychic human crusade discovered them and penetrated into Dream to burn out the parasitic thought. But, in dreams and sleep, and in the daylight of the waking world, a war began.

It was a war of tragedy and loss. The regularity and substance of our world made it a kind of hell to them, and the impossible fluctuations of Nightmare swallowed whole cultures of man.

The Ælf-Adal were made from the memory of pain and knew, in some form, everything we knew, and held strange magics impossible to counter and understand. But we were their creators, or the sustainers of their world at least, and they could never fully understand the sights they saw unfolding as the sun rose. The substance of humanity was dense and strange and different than it was in dreams and here, man did not always run but sometimes fought, and sometimes won, and as the numbers of mankind decayed, the world of Dream began to shrink and tighten round the black cities of the Ælf-Adal.

As well as that, once the war began, the nightmares of mankind filled mutually with one shared terror: the fear of the Nightmare Men, and these twice-reflected visions, the Nightmares of a Nightmare, filled their ancient civilisation. As monstrous and strange as they, but not independent, not truly-thinking beings, mere reactions and distractions, but dangerous enough in their way.

The Prophet of the Aelf-Adal

It was a prophet, or strange Nightmare-God that led the Ælf-Adal beneath, away from the light, away from the reach of man. Here, in a dim strange corner of the material world so dark and fluid that it seemed almost like a part of Dream, they lay and waited, rebuilding their mighty and decadent civilisation, one based on and drawn from the shattered memories of the greatest cities ever made. Yet now real, encoded in stone deep beneath the earth.

The Ælf-Adal are not-quite-real and not-quite-dream, but they are beautiful, the colour of the darkness, and they never age.

They can live and eat and breathe and die. And hate.

The Hatred of the Aelf-Adal

Imagine an ocean, a deep one. Imagine the water is black and dark like North Sea mud. Imagine things living in it, thickly-knitted limbs churning like a mower motor left tipped up and switched on, cutting blindly in long grass. You can’t see the limbs, or the things to which the limbs attach, but you can feel their movement in the thick black sea. They regard you. They hate you. A hate so deep they tear frantically at their own flesh in substitute for reaching yours.

Imagine the sea restrained by glass. Like the walls of an aquarium built on titanic scale. You stand before the sea that rises out of sight and curves to the horizon on each side. You can hear the surface fretting up its waves in storm a distant mile above your head. The glass holds everything back. Inside it you can see brief writhings of that midnight high-pressure world, raging at your presence just beyond its reach.

Imagine that the glass is beautifully made. Etched and engraved with perfect smiling forms. Beyond it, the black water, but, when the light slants just so across the pane, a field of translucent harmony gleams, worked there on its surface by hands and minds that leap the greatest human art. A genius casually employed that vaults with ease the best that man has ever made. Crystal signature of thoughtless superiority. So perfect are its fields and processions that when seen, even glimpsed in a trickle of lateral light, you want to live there, with those frozen people, inside the surface of that glass.

This is how much the the Ælf-Adal despise you.

This is how much they control that hate.

The knowledge of you stabs them in the flesh with every recollection and event. Though they know it well, the wound of you will not close. Each memory of you, each experience, all evidence of your continued being, is like a knife twisting in the skin.

No other species could absorb such titanic contempt and remain sane. They would be reduced to raving berserkers, living only to kill, directly, the loathed enabler of their pain.

But the Ælf-Adal are old; they know much of patience and control. And they know that they are born from the substance of your fear and that if there was nothing left to feel afraid, they might well die.

So.

Their Great Plan

Everything that can be done is being done. The situation is difficult, but there is time. There is always time. They must endure, as they have for so long. They wait and plan for an inverted world, a world where societies and civilisations and empires and species exist purely to instil and sustain fear. A world where dreams enslave the dreamer. Where the walls between sleep and waking tumble down and both realms become one sweet eternal whole.

They will live to see it.

Flayed Skin and Stolen Eyes

Flesh

They have real bones and bodies, and beautiful infra-black skin, void against the dark, but diaphanous gusts of smeared flesh can alter in an instant, bones elongating into trollish stalkers, or warping into crone-curves, Darkflesh bubbling with screaming faces - a blistering cancer of fear.

Light will sharpen their teeth and tightly-fitted skins will remind them of their form. They trade in Elf-Skins, or other skins of form and beauty, stitching themselves into suits of the finely tanned flesh, Wrapping these in equally tight clothes, and those in diaphanous gusts of cloudcradle silk, as if to mimic via textiles the formlessness of the twice-bound flesh beneath.

They breathe in the light to sharpen teeth and tongues. Exhaled breaths of darkness curl around their masks like rising steam. Only in light do their teeth sharpen and tongues point so they can speak clearly. In light do they hunger and in light do they feast, tearing at red meat and drinking bright blood and dark wines.

Masks

Each wears a mask, they claim these suppress the natural terror-imbuing presence of the Aelf-Adal, without which they might have no congress, and this is partly true. The unspoken part says that only these remind them of their identity and shape. To take a mask is to tear much of the solidity and sanity of an Aelf-Adal, for they cannot easily organise ‘I-am’ without one. This is another cause of their nobility for they choose only fine and beautiful masks – the faces of princes, kings and queens. Though they may become hounds or monsters if they choose.

Above the mask, at times they seem to have great horns, or black medusa hair; not snakes but things like snakes; blades or sharp penetrating pseudopodia, or they may have washes of ink that move like comic book art.

Beneath the masks are curious mouths; usually matching their assumed identity and role, though with sharper teeth, though in darkness, or extremis, they can twist and melt into vertical slits, tentacled holes or savage crosswise cuts.

Eyes

Their eyes are never their own, for natural Aelf-Adal evolved within a psychosphere, alive to scent and meaning but knowing only imagined light, which does not shine where no attention guides. The dreaming mind, like a theatre-keeper, sends the wash-lamp of its thoughts here and there, highlighting fragments of scene, leaving where it passes, a deeper darkness than just absence. This darkness was the birth-caul of the Aelf-Adal, and so they have no natural eyes.

Thus they must steal or purchase eyes to see with. Always the most beautiful eyes, always the rarest and most prized. The eyes behind their mask are not their own.

The Deathly Stare

The un-masked full-face stare of an Aelf-Adal invariably kills. This nightmare instinct bursts from them in times of stress or intense joy. The false eyes fall from their faces and are trod underfoot in ecstasy. All who face them die, and no closing of eyes will save them, for the face-sight of an Aelf-Adal penetrates flesh like a black sun while the chaos of their horned medusa-hair writhes like a corona of worms.

Fear-Eaters

While they occupy solid, predictable form, bound to a mask, a name, wrapped within a skin, the Aelf-Adal must eat as mortals do, (though only occasionally). Yet at all times they eat fear.

For the Aelf-Adal, the terror, dread and disquiet that emanates from living things is like streams of water falling in a desert land – each life is like a roving fountain moving through a stony maze like ghosts - appearing and disappearing - and the Aelf-Adal like parched Pilgrims who must seeks these miraculous ever-replenishing gourds which pour their bounty in the shapes of living men.

Without Fear they waste away into ghosts or scurry into dreams as petty thoughts. Given too much they mestatise into apocalyptic angels, primal extra-causal terrors. Neither is their desire, so they must farm terror calmly, and spook in moderate ways. Moderate from their perspective anyway.

Magicians

They gain naturally in magical power as they agelessly age. An inherent gift, existing as they do between real and unreal. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. Though they are not above learning ‘lesser magics’.

Sleep and Waking

The Aelf-Adal recognise no boundary between sleep and wakening, between reality and dream. Naturally amphibious to thought, they are equally present whether you are awake or asleep and can walk through dreams to reach you - dreams which curdle into nightmare in their presence, so that one affected with regular nightmares is said to be Aelf-Kissed.

One might dream of an Aelf-Adal and awaken to see them physically before you, carrying on the same conversation as if nothing has changed, or meet with one and fall into sleep, only to find them still there, again, continuing on. To them, there really was no boundary, the matter is like turning one’s head, or switching between well-known tongues.

M certain twitching morphia hangs about all those who deal with Aelf-Adal - so much involved with those who recognise no bounds to sleep, they themselves seem druggy, now narcoleptic, insomniac, not knowing what is real.

The danger for dreaming mortals is that for the Aelf-Adal, an agreement made in a dream, is as binding and real to them as one made awake.

The Palaces Of Night

The Palaces of the Aelf-Adal bleed into the imagination, for they are built across the bridge of night, with foundations in reality and dream. A gentle terror impregnates all they touch whether they will it or not; Auschwitz fantasies, Ed Gien Decor and Giger-Ossuary Aesthetic, archipelagos of darkness where the unconscious and abyssal meet, courts of dark luxury existing in the limerence of dread. Marked with the emblem of the screaming face, they are always bigger on the inside, and once the inside has been experienced and the boundary broken, larger then beyond.

The Sun

It is not light itself they fear, (and they would say they fear nothing, for Fear they are), but the mass collective concept of 'The Day', the dream of the Above. To them the waking world , with its burning Sun and sharp alien divide between reality and dream, is a conceptually toxic realm.

There is no equivalent, but imagine this; you move to a nation where right-angles do not exist, or where no lines are straight, and even the understanding that things might be otherwise fades slowly from your mind as the collective impossibility takes hold, persisting only as a deep sense of impossible wrongness and an alien nature which you no longer have the concepts to delimit or the words to describe.

Even the dreams of those who come from above can be dangerous, for they remember sunlight and dream of sunlit lands, a dangerous, but yet.. intoxicating, circumstance for the Aelf-Adal.

Society and Economy

Family

While they have a mask, a shape, a name, the Aelf-Adal must eat, must breathe, know pain, hope and, (though they deny it), fear. They even love their children, in a way.

They can mate with one another, or with anything else. Half-dream, they can marry fantasies in nightmares and become pregnant with wonders, or with monsters, and breed fantastic children. It might be that many of the strange and singular things in the Veins of the Earth are their children, and that many wild and black ideas are too.

As they assume nobility-as-selfhood, (there are no common Aelf-Adal, all are Princes (less those formless ones, lost and given to the dark, perhaps they are trolls. Or the mothers of Trolls)), so they must take on the consequences of Nobility; hierarchy, family, descent, inheritance, dynasty and intrigue, even war.

Of course they live for ever so the only means of inheritance is mask-theft or murder, and there is never enough land, or places to rule, but that is not so different from ordinary noble lives.

Nobility

Because their terrors must be harvested gently, they are fine Princes. As utterly inimical to life and sanity as they are, Such power alone does them little good.

Good Governors, Masters of the Silk Trade, Lords of Civilisation. Their interest in complexity exists because they feed off the terrors it sustains. No life means no fear. Therefore they wish to see civilisation bloom. Therefore they are like Renaissance Princes, bountiful characters, often willing to finance and resource expeditions and new settlements. The Courts and Houses of the Terror-Men uphold the cities of the Veins.

Of their meta-culture, few know much, for extended contact with the Aelf-Adal usually destroys even the strongest souls.

Economy

Their 'civilisation' is an act of rationing, and self-control, of drug addicts or vampires measuring and controlling their feeding, and turning that control itself into an artistic act, and a source of further pleasure. Dread is their currency. They trade in hope and dreams, even more than silk, Elf-Skins and beautiful eyes.

................................................................................

The Question of Hatred

Do we actually need the Aelf-Adal to hate?

Soft-Heads - VotE Development

The friendly Neurovore familiar to so many is only one expression of a much more complex life-form which, over the course of its existence, takes on many forms and roles, most so different to each other that not all realise the fundamental connection between them. 

The Soft-Head is a meta-cephalopodic species which eats only fresh brains and other complex nervous tissues. It can either devour these with its beak, or invert and extend its stomach like a trochomorphid limb to cover and envelop these materials. 

The Soft-Heads stomach is, in-effect, a second brain, possessing a combination of complex digestive milks and an extendible sheath of nerves and cellular-level micro-manipulators. In combination with the secondary brain that forms a layer of the stomach, the Soft-Head not only digests the meat of the brain, but absorbs its patterns. The creature absorbs the memories of what it eats. 

Soft-Head spawn are essentially Squid-Tadpoles which feed on microfauna and any ambient specks of protein. As they develop, they gain the ability to inhabit and parasitise a wide range of bodies; eating the brain, tearing, or cutting off the head, or skull, infiltrating tentacles down the chest to massage the heart back into life and, inverting their stomach to interface directly with the bodies nervus system and, with advanced creatures, simulating the flesh and substance of a hominids head and face with cephalopodic mimicry. 

These simulated heads have no bones, apart from a brain-devouring beak, so their heads are soft. The eyes are always a Squids eyes and hair is difficult to fake. 

It’s hard for them to talk. Keeping the lungs active while also simulating the complex mouth, palette, tongue, throat and breathing apparatus, along with the language and intonation of the living original, is a complex business, so Soft-Head voices are voices are hesitant, breathy, whispery, sometimes choking or clotted. 

Though there are cults of soft-heads that specialise in the hyper-specialised combination of skill and magic required to actually simulate a known person, it’s rare for a Soft-Head to take over a humanoid body with the active intention of replacing or pretending to be that person - that would be an enormous, almost savant level problem, and while the Soft-Heads do possess much genius, in most cases this is spent on practical survival. They take complex bodies so they may leave the water for long periods and gain access to the 'dry world', and to an entirely different, and more complex, range of prey and tactics. 

 

Soft-Head Lives 

As a very general guide, roughly one in four of Soft-Head Tadpoles survive each stage of Soft-Head evolution and become Neurovores, meaning most Neurovore pairings need to produce eight or more spawns over their lifetime in order to maintain the species numbers. 

This also means that fully-functional 'Civilised' Neurovores are incredibly rare in comparison to even their more-developed Wendigo ascendants, and even more so compared to the more primitive Body-Takers and man-eaters etc 

This is why most cultures in the Veins consider the 'Neurovore' and their lesser incidents as, in-effect, different species, even if they have enough knowledge of the Nature to understand that they are one life-form. 

1. Tadpoles. Produced in clouds of a thousand or more. With ‘Wild’ Soft-heads, these are allowed to swim free in the Veins, feeding on whatever tiny or insect prey they can find. If they can survive in the wild, the general development cycle goes something like this; 

2. Frog-Eater. An insignificant small water-predator. 

3. Beast-Eater. Larger and more intelligent, capable of bringing down fish and larger animals if they enter the water, or with very intelligent cases, if they only come near it. 

4. Man-Eater. A Soft-Head capable of hunting organised prey with a human level of intelligence. Something equivalent to a Squid-Tiger. 

?. Body-Taker. At any point in this sequence the Soft-Head may develop its core skill set of destroying or removing the head from large prey and replacing it, using its tentacles and inverse stomach to simulate it. This is a skill, not pure instinct, and must be learned. Some Soft-Heads develop this ability alone, some see it in in the memories of their prey, others may see the fear of it by observing the culture of their more intelligent prey. 

5. Wendigo. A Soft-Head capable of fully commanding the body of a complex hominid and using it to leave the water and predate on land. This is a creature with the living body of the prey-species but the flesh and eyes of the Soft-Head in place of its head. The Soft-Head is usually not yet capable of complex language and flesh-simulation, yet. Many cultures predated upon by a Wendigo-type do not fully connect it to the earlier or later developments of the Soft-Head lifecycle. 

6. Neurovore. A full Neurovore is capable of language and complex thought, more akin to a rare and curious civilised being than a beast. In-effect, this is a ‘person’, of sorts. 

 

 

'Wild' and ‘Domestic’ Soft-Heads 

The creatures are culturally divided by the nature of their raising. Some live wild in the for their whole lifespan, others are ‘raised’ in civilised Soft-Head communities, kept in pools and deliberately fed high-quality neuro-stuff. 

 

Genius loci 

A ‘wild’ Soft-Head that never migrates from its original volume can develop an almost perfect physical knowledge of their historic hunting grounds and of the behaviours, and psychology, of any and all of their prey species - almost a kind of savage love, as a hunter for their preferred  environment, making them likely to become 'Emperor' or 'Game Warden' figures of a particular volume. 

They can become, in the minds of some, an almost-protective, many-faced Demon-God - leading to the proliferation of idols, shrines and sacrifices, (much of which are practically irrelevant to the Neurovore, but may be psychologically or spiritually appropriate, since its selfhood is made up of many memories of the inhabitants of these lands and it will, to some extent, absorb their values. 

The physical and magical abilities of such a 'Genius Loci' will be amongst the highest of all the typical skills of all the developed creatures of that volume. As skilled in war as its greatest warriors, as subtle as its greatest hunters, as intelligent and wise as its greatest priests and shaman, as imbued with magical power as the greatest local magicians it could consume. 

Others will only remain ‘wild’ until they gain enough knowledge and understanding to begin thinking of themselves as something like a 'person', after which they often tries seeking out other Soft-Head communities and integrating with them. 

 

'Domestic' Soft Heads 

'Domestic' Soft-Heads are raised within a Soft-Head community. There is little direct parental interest in young, since all parents produce huge clouds, and in many ways the upper echelons of Soft-Head 'society' are totally insane, but a general survival drive leads to a level of care, though with an attitude towards development that would seem absurdly Nietzschean to most mammals. 

While Domestic Soft-Heads are much more likely to survive their initial development and growth, and while they grow in complexity quickly, fed on the brains and spines of complex organisms by their society, they are generally considered to be psychologically 'weaker' and more likely to fall prey to late-life personality degradation. 

The 'Wild' Soft-Head, while unlikely to survive and develop, if they do succeed, has a very long history of the gradual mastery and consumption of ever more complex organisms at their core, making them psychologically stronger and less likely to fall prey to the generalised Schizophrenia of late-life Soft-Head development. Their adaptation of more complex personalities and memories is more like the popular conception of a ruthless predator 'using' the thoughts and memories of its prey as 'masks' in order to predate more ruthlessly. 

There is something of a cultural gap between 'Wild' and 'Domestics', with 'Wilds' Neurovore fewer in number and considered more 'real' and more 'pure' examples of the species, yet also, by some, less adaptable and less capable of fully understanding alternate points of view. 

 

Cosmopolitan Neurovore 

A fully developed and socially integrated Neurovre will often have a staggering range of knowledge and experience from a wild variety of different hominid and other groups. Fed on the brains of the strongest, the subtlest and the skilled from youth, such a being would be equivalent to a multi-classed Fighter/Mage/Thief/Artisan/Trader etc. 

When considered as skills, there are few things such a Neurovore cannot do, but these skills and memories do not necessarily cohere into a sharper or more coherent self. We might imagine an intelligent but not particularly heroic person with the ability to magically 'use' memories, magic, abilities or talents of wide range of dead people, but not necessarily that impressive on their own, or at their core, being in some sense, a mere shuffler of cards. 

Nevertheless, Cosmopolitan Neurovore do tend to be more 'successful' in terms adventurers can understand. Their higher population allows them to develop specialists, like the classic 'Infiltrator' type, trained and specified to use skill and illusory magic to fully replace and simulate the members of other races. Their more complex and wider ranging interactions with the main economies and cultures of the Veins also results in them having many more resources, and simply in having more interactions with the kinds of things Adventurers are interested in. 

 

Economic Position 

Most ‘Civilised’ veins-polis will have at least one Neurovore. Though rarely seen directly, their store, or home-front will be that of a Butcher-Confectioner; flowers, wreathes and bouquets of the finest meats arranged like cakes. A butcher in the veins is more like a confectioner - prepared protein being so rare and expensive. They are truly artists of meat, meat flowers, meat crowns and spirals, meat-pies etc. (Since they can only eat brains, and these must be living - Neurovore are one of the few Ethnocultures of the Veins which regularly have spare meat. ) 

Their public face will be one or more well-fed, extremely satisfied and competent high-level slaves, often with the cross-skull circular scar of Neurovore person-surgery. The Master will only reveal themselves for high status guests or when their hands-on skills are needed. 

While nominally butcher/confectiners, Neurovore perform a wide range of distinct services, including; Translating, Appraising, Crafting, Doctoring, Surgery of the Body, Surgery of the Mind 

 

Their Only Currency is Brains 

The only currency most Neurovor will accept is that of living, sentient brains, which almost always means the brains of living slaves, (or you could massively overpay in something like Knotsmen debt-threads or Occultum Coins). There can be a sliding scale for the brains of those with unusual abilities, memories and skills. 

 

Skilled Craftsmen, Translators & Appraisers 

With an in-depth memory of a huge variety of different cultures, languages, life-paths and skills, Neurovore are known to sometimes be great craftsmen, sometimes willing to produce the art or artefacts of another race for payment when that race itself might not. (Some call them great 'Fakers', good at producing versions of things, but somehow lacking in the execution.) 

Along with their skill in craft goes a wide knowledge of languages and cultures which makes them excellent and trusted translators, and a general wisdom and neutrality that sometimes sees them called in as appraisers or judges. 

 

Surgeons Of The Body 

Often competent doctors, some Neurovore specialise in Cepahalopod limb replacements; A semi-lobotomised young Soft-Head, specifically bred, is attached to the end of the lost limb and cultured to adopt the behaviours of the original. 

They don't have bones and make bad legs by can be good arms or hands – though they take some time to learn to use and you need to keep them hydrated. (They can also develop half-ideas of their own.) They have less structural support or rigidity but more dexterity and options for multi-directional movement, good for some fencers, climbing, thieves and magicians - who can learn voiceless casting by making sigils with their cephalopod-hand. 

You can also keep the beak and eyes in for extra awareness, and as a handy tool. The longer the limb is attached the more the user can sense through its eyes and the more sophisticated its utility. 

 

Surgeons Of The Mind 

Neurovore Brain-Surgery is much more sophisticated than anything so called in the Bright Lands. 

They begin by peeling back the scalp, sawing through the skull, then peeling back the brain-cowl. They then extend their stomachs into the brain-pan, ‘tasting’ the brain, rolling it in their extendable gut, nibbling and altering. 

This can alter memory and selfhood in sophisticated ways - full personality surgery, (though it’s always easier to take things out than add them in). They can also sustain complex dream states in imaginary worlds - though these are as much a creation of the subconscious of the target as that of the surgeon. 

There is some chance of infection and the skull will need to be fixed back on top and the skin sewn shut, which leaves marks, unless extra cosmetic care is taken to disguise this. 

Also very occasionally the Neurovore will just eat the brain, or maybe parts of it - for them it’s like holding food in your mouth, but not chewing or swallowing, while doing complex work. One needs a brain, after all, to recover from Brain Surgery. 

 

Objects and Treasures 

Neurovore produce a variety of rare and potent philtres and items, often produced from their own milks, or the secretions of their smaller kin, or made of complex weaves of magic and neurochemistry. 

Blank    

(The Protagonist Potion). Very expensive and must be ingested orally. Blank removes all identity from the drinker but leaves languages, skills and abilities intact. The more complex skills you want left - the greater chance of remission. Blank cannot be 'healed' or fixed via magic. Is used by various cultures on their most useful and valuable slaves, or on high status targets in court intrigues 

Skill Philtres

Also very extremely expensive (almost as much in effort as actually gaining the skill would be). These philtres combine complex patterns of understanding and action taken or distilled from living subjects, the core matrix suspended in a concoction that includes micro-soft-heads. 

Reading Books

Written on the finest skin, these works sometimes purport to be ‘ordinary’ books. Woven into their substance are specific mild neurotoxins and milk derivatives, combined with lesser opiates that ooze invisibly from the book when held by warm hands. The text and images within are either direct enchantments or, (more expensive), have such works woven into their text and seeming. These act to create a book which ‘reads’ its reader, and alters them, sometimes in mild but long-term ways, others in more direct ways. The book is usually at least slightly addictive. The longer and more subtle the effect, and the more hidden, the more expensive the book. Sharp and strong effects cost less, but are much more easily noticed by the reader and are more likely to provoke resistance. 

Memory Pearls

Strange curls of gold and pearl containing single thoughts, or even alter-memory selves. More expensive depending on how complete a self you want. These are often used by spies or operatives, those involved in complex intrigues, or as sophisticated torture devices. 

 

 

Neurovore Psychology - A self-of-selves 

Psychologically, Soft-Heads are incredibly strange in comparison to most self-aware life, having almost, clusters of personalities, councils of selves, all unified by a coherent predatory instinct and an 'othering' of brain-possessing individual life forms that forms the true structure of Soft-Head society, (such as it is). 

Mere baskets of floating identity, minds whose selfhoods flow like mixing scents, as timeless as ghosts, whom they often resemble in behaviour, for the Neurovore feed as much upon memories and sentience itself as upon the meat of the brain, and every Neurovore absorbs almost all of the selfhood of whatever it consumes, making them astoundingly, sometimes terrifyingly, powerful and knowledgeable, and also often insane, deeply utterly mad by human standards. 

The greatest threat to a Neurovores survival is its own ever-shifting selfhood and its writhing protean memory 

As neurovore grow from tadpoles most of heir initial meals are of simple beings with simple instincts

and do not present a huge problem to the Neurovores capacity to absorb Selves, but as they grow, they hunger for more complex prey. If they successfully consume them, the neurovore gains the preys knowledge and awareness - making them even more effective at hunting that kind of prey, but this also presents challenges, as more potent and coherent individuals possess powerful senses of selfhood. 

Memory and sentience is not a weight-for-weight matter. Identity orbits around particular experiences, powerful instincts, core philosophies, inherent beliefs, particular attitudes to the world

and central organising memories. A particularly potent and coherent mind with a deep, strong and capacious worldview, and a powerful drive to live, can partially displace the Neurovores 'core' self. 

This is rare, and is, to an extent, a 'self-solving' problem, since the Neurovore is still an obligate cerebrovore and will still be driven to eat brains, and in particular the brains of ever more complex creatures. These complex brains of powerful creatures, in turn, presenting a high likelihood of displacing or fundamentally altering the current Ego. 

 

The Blood Speaks 

Ultimately, as the Neurovore would say, ‘the blood speaks’. All these powerful fractured creatures remain Neurovore, even if they don't realise it themselves. They still need to eat brains and they are still enmeshed in a society of creatures who need to eat brains, and who are not beloved by others, and this society is their main power and source of survival. 

As well as this, the instincts of the older, more nakedly predatory, personality still swim beneath the surface of whichever superego currently thinks it is 'in charge'- putting its own tinge upon the values and worldview of the main soul. 

Each new brain consumed creates a new possibility to shuffle the deck of thoughts, shifting the perceived dominance of the current array of personalities, giving the original 'pure' Neurovore the chance to re-assert control, a newly introduced personality the chance to take the helm, or a variety of other things to happen. 

 

The Men Who Were Thursday 

Still there is a level of power and experience where Neurovore society, such as it is, no longer really works as a coherent racial/species group, as of all those who are very strong, many are no longer themselves, or they no longer believe themselves to be themselves, and are 'faking it', using the memories stored by their 'old' more-pure Neurovore selves to 'pretend' to be a 'real' Neurovore while they believe themselves to be the reincarnated personality of a prey-thing. 

Tn human terms this would be like an Empire being lead by a group of hyper-talented, very powerful schizophrenics, each of which believes themselves to be some other thing, and is only going along with the group on the surface, while following a quite different set of desires and directives. 

This is a kind of 'Man Who Was Thursday' situation as much of Neurovore 'society' half-knows about this already and regards what we would call the schizophrenia problem as more of an element to be managed than a problem to be solved. In fact it’s quite useful in a number of ways.

 

Veins of the Earth - Workshop

'Queen Mab's Palace' will be moving to layout soon. My gigantic review of Hugh Cooks 'Chronicles of and Age of Darkness' is done. What will False Machine be working on next?

Veins of the Earth - Remastered

And by working on, I mean that I have started work, not that we have a book ready right now. This is the beginning of a long process. 

The new Veins will probably be A4, to fit in with other False Machine books, and will have new content, a new layout, hopefully some new images.

But what needs to be added? What needs to be changed? What didn't work for people last time? I have some ideas but I also want your input.

Drop your comments

•  At the Substack [https://substack.com/@pjamesstuart] 
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•  Emails to pjamesstuart@gmail.com 
•  Or even reviews and analysis on your own blogs and channels.

He Cooked – Zaan, Olo Malan.

 Hugh Cook’s Chronicle of a World of Darkness, Part 2

I return to you for the end of the tale. Hugh Cooks intended-sixty, planned-twenty, published-ten Fantasy Series; ‘A Chronicle of an Age of Darkness’. Or as I re-named it in my first review; ‘Zaan Said the Sun’, from one of the more pleasing euphonic discursions of Book Two, ‘Worsmiths & Warguild’. Or, as the planet upon which the story set on is named; ‘Olo Malan’, a planet in the Tulip Continuum, in the Permissive Dimensions. So let’s call it ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’, for the sun is rising on a darkened world, beneath strange multicoloured stars.

 

This is a Long Post!

 So, here is a contents list;

Here is the first Hugh Cook review, covering Books 1 to 5

Part One of this Review – Escape from Injiltaprajura!

Part Two of this Review – Werewolf & Wormlord

Part Three of this Review – Worshippers & Way

Part Four of this Review – Witchlord and Weaponmaster

 ….

 

The last half of the series takes us through sweaty intrigues in a blissfully described tropical island city, post-beowulfian Warrior Saga in the mud and marshes of Wen Endex, Science-Fantasy Trans-Colonial Trauma and accidental Mau’Dibification in the city of the future of the past, and finally; a big sprawling adventure by a Fated Heir that links the whole thing. 

With all this we climb deeper into Hugh Cook. A comfortable fit, and, as so often happens when reading a bunch of stuff from a singular mind, our interest transmits itself from the world described to the mind describing, for there are many themes and repetitions in ‘Zaan; Olo Malan’, many sons will deal with fathers, many scholars will argue with warriors, powers will be struggled for (and with), there will be less, but still several, visionary and often horny dream-sequences, and much realism will be woven ‘midst the unreal. In the end, justifications will be denied, questioned and claimed. In the end of the end there will be one singular message, one lambent individual fragment that Hugh Cook would wish you to take away from these stories. One thing that, above all, he would wish you to remember. It is a subtle piece of wisdom, yet can be quickly described. But I will not reveal it! Not until the very, the absolute, end of what looks like it’s going to be a very long review. To see, and to understand, you must come with me to that end, and to get there, we must start, as all things do, in the middle, on the isle of Untulchilamon… 

…….. 

But before that, consider this extended quote, which comes not from Untilchilamon, the location of books Six and Seven, but from the very end of the series, from book Ten; ‘Witchlord & Weaponmaster’, and which I put here at the start of the article, partly because it’s quite long and there is more of a chance of you reading it here, and partly because it gives you a reasonable idea of where we are going with all this, and why and how Hugh Cook is a little different. 

Here the Narrator of ‘Witch & Weapon’, who may be the diegetic Wizard Sten-Pilitkin, but who is probably also Hugh Cook, who was also an army medic for much of his youth, describes the death of a Washer-Woman, cruelly but randomly killed, whose body lies near the path of the Hero, Guest Gulkan in a story which is both True History, and Deliberate Fabulation;

 

“And if you are surprised to find in these pages so much war in combination with so little suffering, why, then know well the reason. This is Guest Gulkan's story, the biography of a warrior, and a warrior of the Yarglat at that. And your ever accomplished warrior is necessarily an amnesiac - and, more, neglects to see that which is not useful for his purposes. 

It is said by the tender that any tale of war should concentrate on its suffering, for the tender-minded hold such suffering to be the ruling reality of war. In this they are in error: and, focusing on the dead and the dying, they misunderstand that which they deprecate. Misunderstanding the dynamics of war, they cannot thereafter hope to alter those dynamics. 

If history has any moral mission, then it is this: to render to the fullest the complexities and uncertainties of the living human reality which we endure. For it is we ourselves whom we seek to understand when we read in the pages of history - we, the human people, wizards and warriors, wonderworkers and washerwomen.

 

If we study the affairs of puppets and poppets then we will be well-equipped for life in a dolls house; but the world is not so amiably constituted, and attempts to treat it as if it were lead commonly to disaster. 

Let us then stage no moral charades with puppets and poppets. For if we do, then we delude ourselves; and, surely, to choose to be wilfully blind as to our own nature is the greatest of crimes, for without self-knowledge there can be no governance of the self by the self. 

Yes and there are those who deny this, and say that it is sufficient to yield in faith to the diktats of some deity such as Zoz the Ancestral or similar. In such faith they are prepared to burn all history, blaming the page for the battle, the court record for the crime. The reason for their willed ignorance is simple: self-knowledge and self-awareness are painful, so the weak and the inadequate customarily prefer the numb oblivion of the slavery of unquestioning faith. 

In defiance of such wilful ignorance, this history speaks, holding truth to be the highest virtue. For only through an acknowledgement of the living realities of our world and our own existence can we attain self-knowledge and autonomous adulthood. And only by acknowledging the living realities of war can we hope to understand the persistence of war, which continues to blight our world despite the best-hearted efforts of those tender-minded moralists who would have us believe that war is one mass of conscious suffering, and that every warrior is a victim. 

This book is a history of a warriors living reality. And the truth of the warrior is ambition combined with amnesia, selective vision combined with selective memory, and the belief that victory is the validation of all suffering. Therefore, believing truth to be the highest virtue, we will not distort the record with moral charades incompatible with the truth; but rather, will note the plain fact, which is that Guest Gulkan swiftly forgot the dying washerwoman as he hastened up the stairs towards the Hall of Time.” 

…. 

That this is an ostensible justification and moral argument for the nature of a story from one of its characters, (and perhaps from that characters creator), who had previously, (in book Nine, ‘Worshippers & Way’), partly denied the need for such justifications, should not be taken as a criticism. Many questions and moral conflicts have no absolute answer, and some perhaps should not. The creator is always a work in progress, and in very long creations, that take a while to make, the presence of the living, changing, mind of the creator is an essential part of the work. We deal here not in numbers but the deeds of man. 

But these are worries for the end of our history. Before that; the middle, and, (like I said), Untulchilamon;

 

 

PART ONE - Escape from Injiltaprajura!

Our last encounter with ‘Zaan; Olo Malan’ was ‘Wicked & Witless’, starring the tiresome and dislikable Sean Sarazin, aka; WATASHI!, and his witnessing of the Fall of Argan to the Swarms of the Deep South. 

Now, a change in both scene and time! We fly across the great (rectangular: will fit on a two-page spread), ocean of Moana, half way across the described world, to the baking Isle of Untilchilamon, and as we fly, we return also in time to before the Fall of Argan. For this shall be the setting of books both Six and Seven! ‘The Wazir and the Witch’ and ‘The Wishstone and the Wonder-Workers’. 

 

The Land and the Location 

Untulchilamon, a sweaty island in a southern sea, and more; beset with stilling winds for fair chunks of the year, this in an age of sail. Yet bountiful and home to the bloodstone city of Injiltaprajura, its walls bright as wounds beneath the burning sun, green with moon paint beneath the multicoloured stars. Why? Because it is built on the ancient ruins of a possibly-interdimensional arcology/prison/space ship which goes down maybe-infinite levels into who-knows-where and which also has several still-functioning infinite-production machines which no-one understands. 

Specifically - the magical machines from Below produce enough water to fill the thirst of Injiltaprajura and to keep that part of Untulchilamon fertile. They also produce ice, and some very random post-singularity industrial products which sometimes spurt up out from underneath and totally poison local fishing, but which are also rare and valuable. Thus lies the wealth, and life, of Untulchilamon - built unwittingly on an ancient magical prison or unnatural nature and to which it seems every basement and stairway in Untulchilamon is somehow connected. The city has an 'Underdark', or perhaps a Mega-Dungeon, which comes in very handy for Hugh Cook as he needs to rapidly apparate and randomly transport his dazed protagonists between various situations. 

What are its cultural ancedents? If Argan was roughly America-sizes and arranged, (cold on top, hot below), Untulchilamon is equatorial, maybe a bit Indian, a bit South-East Asian, maybe a bit Madagascarian? It is quite possibly Banaba, or ‘Ocean Island’¸ a very small and very isolated tropical island where, for some reason, Hugh Cook spent several years of his childhood. 

It is a small place quite close to one large big place; the continent of Yestron, so that, whatever happens in Yestron ends up, ultimately, but not immediately, affecting Untulchilamon. This will prove consequential. 

 

The Chaos and the Catastrophes 

A great teetering unstable pyramid of complex conflicts weighs down upon our protagonists; (initially this is the ever-callow red-skinned Ebrell Islander Chegory Guy, and later largely the large Empress Justina Thrug). Since we are not Chegory Guy, and are actually capable of arranging and organising our thoughts, I will describe these conflicts from the top down, from the highest level of organisation to the lowest. 

 

The Pogroms and the Politics 

Untulchilamon falls within the sphere of Yestron, the large continent to the East. The last appointed governer from that Empire was Wazir Sin, a man bent on Pogrom and murder, especially of Ebbies, the red-skinned Ebrell Islanders, who he nearly wiped out. 

When Yestron fell into Dynastic War, (the Talonsklavara), Sin was deposed by Lonstantine Thrug, a Yudonic Knight of Wen Endex, who stopped the genocides, and introduced a (more) liberal regime, but who then got syphilis and went mad, and was succeeded by his daughter; the sleazy but likeable strong and large Empress, Justina Thrug. Justina is opposed initially by Aquitaine Varazchvardan, the albino Lawgiver who served under Sin and quite liked the pogroms, and in the second book, by Nadalastabstla Banraithanchumun Ek, a man whose name I will not write twice, the much more effective, evil, racist and competent High Priest of Zoz the Ancestral. 

As our tale begins, it seems like a winner has emerged from the Talonsklavara; Aldrach the Third, Mutilator of Yestron and ruler of much of it. If this is so, then as Aldrach Three consolidates his rule, his eye will eventually fall upon Untulchilamon. He will be coming, and he will be mutilating. (If he actually won, it’s not like there are telephones on Olo Malam). 

 

The Crooks and the Criminals 

At this exact time, Thieves attack! Two separate sets of thieves/adventurers are infiltrating Injiltaprajura! They seek the  'Wishstone', sacred jewel of Office of the now-Empress Justina. 

The apparently-successful theft of the Wishstone triggers absolute multilayered chaos in Injiltraprajura as the original thieves are chased by the adventurers, and the forces of Justina, and as the relatively-evil Varazchvardan, and anyone else, arrest all the Usual Suspects (Ebrell Islanders). 

 

The Dreams and the Demon 

While all of this is going on, a mysterious supernatural force is effecting Injiltaprajura, melting the boundary between dreams and reality, making nightmares real and generally being strange - a Demon is coming through into our world! This seems to have literally nothing to do with any of the other plot threads! It’s just happening!? What? 

 

The Golden Gulag 

Did you think that was the end of the plot threads? We are barely half-way through! 

Injiltaprajura is actually built on a crazy piece of post-singularity science-fantasy wreckage. A ruined arcology, and mysterious inter-dimensional prison realm from before the Days of Wrath, twenty thousand years ago! 

It’s a hundred-layered massively malfunctioning prison complex for the questionable private security apparatus of a long-gone multidimensional star empire! Many of the odd people and curious creatures roaming around Injiltaprajura are products of this ancient time, although, (apart from the hidden immortals) no-one currently alive really knows or fully understands this. Within the depths of the Golden Gulag is an evil Therapist; a sentient and immortal torture machine which largely wants to do evil things. Also present Below is a mysterious Organic Rectifier; a piece of technology capable of changing the form of a living being, and even of creating immortality! 

The presence of the ruined hyper-dimensional prison complex has nothing to do with the threat of Aldrach Three, Dream-infiltrating Demon, (which is its own separate plot thread), or, to begin with, the Crab. 

 

The Crab and the… Confinement? 

A major part of both books is the presence of a magical and (arguably) semi-divine giant Hermit Crab whose origins are almost completely unrelated to everyone and everything else. He just happens to be there. 

An immortal spirit of the Sun, (or a sun), the Crab-soul was banished from its natural sphere over a religious matter, ended up on Olo Malam and inhabited the body of the first thing it could understand; an ordinary crab. 

Now trapped in Crab form, (though it did manage to grow the body very big, and also has terrifying telekinetic powers), the Crab is unquenchably tired of its immortal form and of the endless efforts of humanity to suborn it towards their intrigues and dramas. 

The Crab is a wild card! 

 

The Sanity and the Summation 

So much happens on Injiltaprajuna that I think even Hugh Cook has trouble remembering in later books, (and he is very good at organising his notes).  Suffice to say that after a great deal of intrigue, adventure and bouncing around, the Demon is defeated, the terrible rule of Aldrach III is returned to Injiltaprajura, the Wonderworking Sorcerers of Injiltaprajura consistently fail to do anything useful in either book, the Wishstone is recovered by Guest Gulkan, (star of book Ten), the sorrowful Hermit Crab is finally given an immortal human body by the Organic Rectifier and, with the enforced aid of some other immortal characters, sets about the long repair of the Chasm Gates that connected Olo Malam to the Star-Spanning Civilisation of the Nexus, and Chegory Guy, Justina Thrug and the core cast manage to escape from Injiltaprajura via the flying machine of the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin. 

 

 

The Annoyances and the Aggravations 

There were several things I did not love about book Six ‘Wish & Wonder’, which were partially absolved in Book Seven ‘Witch and Wazir’. 

Chegory Guy is yet another frustrating teenage boy protagonist who notices less than the reader. This is the fourth such out of six books. Bring back Miphon, Blackwood and Yenn Olass! Not only that but Chegory Guy is powerless, passive and tongue-tied (at first at least). There are a few too many moments when someone speaking clearly would end the plot, or at least shorten it. 

Furthermore ‘Wish & Wonder’ is made of several plots that have nothing to do with each other but just happen to interact. Which... fine. Ok. A Cook-Book is always anarchic in plotting but there is usually a through line and some kind of tie-up by the end.

There is also a lot of ping-pong with the characters and plotlines, plenty of people rushing around and not really getting things done. 

Add to this, a new manic meta-epistolification which besieges the narrative of ‘Wish & Wonder’ with unrelenting terror. Much as I have seen Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Hamlet´ described as “a brilliant production by Kenneth Branagh, horribly monstered by the performance of Kenneth Branagh”, so ‘Wish & Wonder’ is a hyper-dense narrative created by Hugh Cook, absolutely stabbed and molested by the Epistolary Enthusiasms of Hugh Cook. 

First; this is the first story set in the Age of Darkness that has, not the ever-faithful variable third person, but an in-world writer. All, (nearly all) of this narrative is ostensibly being written by an individual who was, at the time of the events, present, close to the action, perhaps a resident of the Domjaradron (loony bin). 

Second; this text is being/has been, edited and cut down by the Redactors of Odrom, a tiresome and unimaginative group who note when they disagree with the factual basis of events and even argue with each other in the comments, and who apparently have cut out quite a gigantic amount of discursive rambling by the Originator. 

Thirdly; Injiltaprajura being a deeply cosmopolitan place, there are many and varied tongues spoken there. This being a Cook book, everything is given in English and we only find out what the actual language is when the writer, the originator, starts commenting on the translation of various words and phrases and what they might mean. 

This is common enough for a Cook Book BUT - since all the characters are also multilingual, we can be in a situation where the characters are arguing about language, in various languages, and the Originator is also commenting on what they are arguing about, and the Redactors of Odrom are ALSO commenting on this with each other, and perhaps arguing, so we can have an active three-level meta-argument going on. 

Fourth; the main character of ‘Wish & Wonder’, Chegory Guy, cannot speak well. He is massively afflicted with a systemically tied-tongue! The point of view in 'Witch and Wazir' floats around a lot more but not being stuck with a vocally-frustrated knife-fighter who never fights with his knives and who would shorten the book by half if he could just form a sentence, is a relief. 

Fifth and last - there is STILL the omniscient thirdperson as, before the book even starts an un-named and unknown entity, who sounds a lot like Hugh Cook, gives us an introduction, and a description of the origins of the magical hermit crab who nearly forms a deus-ex-carcinoma in Wishstone. 

This is too much epistleisation Hugh Cook. 

 

The Good and the Gleeful 

Those were most of my problems with Injiltaprajura, most of which attach to the first of the pair; ‘Wish & Wonder’. Things get better in Book Seven; ‘Witch and Wazir’, and in both there is much to enjoy. 

 

The Classic Cookisms 

Cook is absolutely WALLOWING in euphony, neologisms, invention and the sheer ridiculous music of prose. At times his coagulations of sound and meaning form a near textual Jazz made purely out of sound and symbols which flows alongside the text. Try saying some of these out loud; 

…. 

" Firfat Labrat's warehouse of drugs in Marthandorthan" 

…. 

"The man in question was actually Pelagius Zozimus, a wizard of the order of Xluzu and the quest-companion of Guest Gulkan (pretender to the throne of Tameran), Hosaja Sken-Pitilkin (a fellow wizard) and Thayer Levant (a cut-throat from Chi'ash-lan)." 

…. 

"Have you in your voluntary or involuntary possession any knife, bodkin, knitting needle, dragon hook, sword, spear, bow, catapult, arbalest, fighting stick, battering ram, snake, scorpion, basilisk, vial of vitriol or other weapon of death or terror or violence? 

Whereupon Zosimus answered in the negative, was subjected to swift but expert search, then was allowed to step closer (but not too close!) to the Empress. The Imperial Linguist stepped forward with him. Both elven lord and linguist bowed. 

'Toxteth', said the linguist, then bowed again and withdrew." 

Danny Paik on Artstation

There are more Cook-Book staples, like; 

·        The extensive sex-dreams of teenage boys,

·        Characters entering states of mystic logarithmya which seem oddly like Cooks internal state.

·        The sheer joy in trying to find out just how long he can make regularly used words, which is finally reached in; "Zazazolzodanzarzakazolabrik, also known as the Scraglands, the Wastes, the Scorpion Desert - or Zolabrik for short.”

·        More Court Cases (what lawyer hurt you Hugh Cook?)

·        Lots of interweaving strands of action; (you can never tell which will be dominant).

·        Another very misogynist Empire, (this time the near-fascist worship of Zozz the Ancestral).

   

The Jubilant (?) Justina 

Even better, the tale increasingly orbits around the Empress Justina Thrug, a woman consistently described as 'large' and 'fleshy', and a consummate schemer and protagonist with less than five teeth, (sweet foods). 

Justina mixes a wider range of more complex emotion, a deeper experience of life and more subtle awareness of and relation to, power, with a dram of the slightly deranged optimism and indefatigable spirit of Drake Douhey. Thus, she engages with a lot of crazy schemes, is nearly executed multiple times, is restored to power multiple times, adventures underground, lies, tricks, astounds and generally is more fun and tolerable to be around.  

The Bubble of Bounce 

"Shabbles light dimmed immediately to nothing and the demonic one soared up, up, up into the night sky. The humid darkness of Injiltaprajura and of the polluted Laitemata fell away below. All Untulchilamon came in sight, a mass of dark within dark, reaching away for league upon league from Justina's capital to the desolations of the north. 

Higher and still higher yet flew Shabble, ascending imaginary mountains in nary more than a couple of heartbeats. Exulting in pure speed flew Shabble. So does the dolphin exult when from the water it explodes in joy shimmering. So does the dragon rejoice when in its strength it holds the heights then plunges, diving with a scream, with power ferocious, with speed controlled and absolute precision, terror matched to beauty as it stoops. Up rose Shabble in such triumph until the very curvature of the planetary surface was clearly to be perceived, and the sun also, the sun of the new day. 

Then sang Shabble, then Shabble sang, louder and then louder yet, pouring out music unheard for twenty thousand years, rejoicing in the Symphony of the Sun, a song of joy to exult and honour all those who argue with mortality, a paen of praise for the will to be and to become, for ambition unlimited, audacity vaulting and the triumph of the moment. 

Shabble rose yet higher. Singing singing singing to the rising sun, the local star, the star itself delighting as it sang with a song fiercer and braver yet than any known to creatures of the flesh, its joy a blaze of energy unleashed, exploding light outburning in vacuum wastelands a hundred million miles distant.

Glory to life!

Glory to us and our becoming!

And to the sun, glory!

Thus Shabble, singing as if to rival the sun itself.

Non servium."

 …

 

But who, or what, is this mysterious soaring entity or demon, this Shabble? 

It, or ‘they’ are a children’s toy, twenty thousand years old, slightly lonely and constitutionally unable to take anything seriously. 

Shabble is a Sun. A real, life-sized one, wrapped in its own pocket dimension and given access to ours through a hyperdimensional transponder about the size and coolness of a big orange. 

Why would the society of the Nexus do something as insane as making an entire sentient sun, then locking it in a micro-cosmos on its own, and why would they then make this potentially-godlike entity a children’s toy? 

It seems its quite difficult to make an actually more-than-human intelligence that can still, and still wants to, communicate with humans. Shabbles were one of the only ways they found to do it. A failed experiment as, though they have the calculation powers of supercomputers, they don’t really like to calculate. Instead they were produced en-masse and sold as children’s toys. 

Shabble, this Shabble, may be the only one left. Shabble was made to play, but has lasted twenty-thousand years, and may need a little adjustment. Shabble is also one of the most curious and interesting characters in ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’. Don’t worry! He returns in Book Ten! 

… 

“Injiltaprajura saw nothing of Shabble as instarlat's shadows shortened toward noon. Shabble was still missing as the shadows of salahanthara lengthened toward sunset. Yet all that time the demon of Jod was furiously busy. 

Doing what you ask? 

The answer is simple. 

Falling. 

From morn to noon fell Shabble, from noon to dewy eve - a summers day; and with the setting sun dropped from the zenith like a falling star. Steam in whispers vapoured into shreds as deep to the seas drove Shabble, descending fathoms five and full, drawn down to the depths where the moray weaves in coils than cobra greater, then drawn far deeper, down to the utter dark, the siltworm cold, the black of blindness engolding. 

Then Shabble uprose and surfaced. 

Hovered briefly, then was gone, making for Injiltaprajura - leaving the dark seas rocking, rocking endlessly toward the shore.”

....... 

 

 

The Precision of Plots 

‘Witch & Wazir’ is also better because it’s mainly about one thing; Escape from Injiltaprajuna!, instead of the complex intrigue plus random-demon plot we got in ‘Wish & Wonder’. Now the looming political threat of Aldrach Three is the main driving problem and our 'protagonists' have the central difficulty of escaping the island alive. 

The Empress Justina has a tenuous grip on power, is opposed by a big chunk of the population and power brokers of Untulchilamon and is dedicated to getting off the island with as many of her followers as she can. 

The same ships which can get her off, will also carry bad news and enemies on the way in, and the soldiers she needs to seize the ships are loyal to money she increasingly doesn't have and a position no-one respects. The evil racist maniac Aldrach the Third, Mutilator of Yestron, has won his civil war and as soon as he turns his eye to Untulchilamon, everyone connected to Justina is going to get mutilated. 

There is no more wondering what the plot is going to be about and on the whole I find this makes Cook Books a lot more tolerable. He is an amazingly discursive and wandering writer anyway, so even with a tight central axis we are going to get a lot of hither-and-yon, but 'Wishstone and Wonder-Workers' had TWO rambling main plots, and was written in epistolary style by a rambling obsessive madman, AND was 'edited' in epistolary style by craven scholars who argued with each other, AND the arguable main character was tongue-tied. For some this might have been the right amount of crazy but for me it was too much. 'Witch and Wazir' was a lot more manageable. 

 

Less Decadent and Delirious 

It is less packed and decadent, and less overwhelmingly new and strange, and that is a limitation. In "Wishstone", though I had problems with it, the torrent of wild fresh information, multiple epistolary conceits, shifting points of view, reality breakdowns and cultural overwhelm, actually synergised very well with hot, dense, sweaty, complex, orientalist and luxurious Injiltaprajura. That is an effect not to be sneezed at, though I prefer having at least one hand for the ship of story rather than being bashed around by the storms of Cooks invention. 

 

The Nastiness of the Nexus 

We also receive, (offhand as per-Cook), a staggering amount of backstory and information on the nature of the trillion-world pan-cosmic mega-culture called the Nexus. Olo Malam was a Prison-Planet of the Nexus, and a place to do questionable experiments in a dimension where the stars are multicoloured and the laws of reality a bit more loose than the stark white-starred Star-Trek Galaxy that makes up the Nexus-bulk. 

The Golden Gulag was a mega-prison, and one of the inmates, the super-Genius Ivan Pokrov, managed to both make himself immortal and to cut off this planet from the rest of the Nexus 20,000 years ago. 

The end of the book involves a magic crab in human form forcing Pokrov to begin the process of trying to fix the connection to the Nexus, which may take a million years, but he has that long anyway, and probably the magical crab man will be a big help. This is probably the most important thing to happen in any of the sequence and if it had gone on a long time likely would have ended up ending the 'Age of Darkness'. 

Over the next three books we will find out a lot more about the Nexus, including one piece of information even the Nexus itself likely did not have. One of the sub-themes of ‘Zaan Olo Malam’ is the deepening question of whether we really want the Chasm Gates re-opened and the sci-fi star empire to return. 

But of that, more later. 

 

The Realms and the Races 

(We also find out what 'race' everyone is? Or did we learn that in the last one? Injultaprajura is a population melting pot and for the first time in the Cook Books we get an in-depth low-down on what colour, shape and culture everyone is and how they interact. 

Most from Argan, (the first five books) are brownish. Ebrell Islanders are actual-red. Ashmoleans are eqiuvilent to our Africans I think. The Japanese-seeming Yandajuulas are literal-grey and extremely racist and those of Wen Endex seem somewhat European-equivalent).

 

 

Thus Ends Part One 

That was a long first part but don’t worry, all the others will be shorter. If you are tired of reading, now may be a good time to take a break. Next, we fly to Galsh Ebrek!

.......

 

PART TWO - Werewolf & Wormlord 

We are back baby! Back to Beowulf. To fly north to Wen Endex, the cold and swampy land where men tread mud through warriors halls. The homeland of Justina Thrug, to which she escaped at the end of the last book. Here the mother of a monster has arisen from the Swamps, the aged king who long ago slew the creatures get, sets the son of his disinherited heir on a mighty quest – for the three saga swords of legend, so that he might defeat SHE, and become…. King! 

But while this story is set after the previous book, and likely parallel to the Matter of Argan that occupied the first five, it does not directly concern ‘The Thrug’, but the Banker Alfric Danbog.  

 

The Anguish and the Alienation 

Alfric Danbrog was raised as a sweaty heroic murdering Yudonic Knight to fight monsters and do quests, (or at least talk about doing that), and also as the heir to the disinherited heir to the throne, but broke from his family and sought life in the mysterious Bank, a little enclave of the commercial, cosmopolitan, international, abstract and disembodied in the otherwise dark, wet and muddy Galsh Ebrek.

 

This cultural split in the mind of a man, between the culture of his birth and that of his age, will be a theme in all three remaining books. Each has a hero torn between one life-way and another, and each performs the sins and virtues of each culture to the other. There is a lot of internalising. It is something that makes the stories good. 

But first; Alfric! How was he raised? What is his marrow? Here, a scene where the Quester sits in-hall before his king, hearing the endless stories of endless bards and boasters, for hour after hour; 

… 

"on went the night, full of the wind of words. Of ring-prowed ships; of men in bearskin gloves manning such ships, the masts and the sails of the same sheeted with ice; of swords adorned with coiled gold; of steeds with plaited manes, brave beasts which outran the wind; fell monsters encountered and defeated on a murky moor; horns heartening heroes as men graced with deathless courage met their end in contest with onswarming hordes of heartless reptiles; war-arrows embedded in corpses strewn upon steep rocky screens, discarded at the foot of precipitous crags, lying derelict in waters bloody and disturbed. 

Of this sang the song-singers; and they sang also of the undisturbed valour of men  who died without complaint though they were pierced to the vitals by deadly-barbed boar-spears; and of the outlandish grief which doomed the hero Hroblar to an uncouth death when his hand-meshed battle corslet animated itself and ate through his flesh to the bone. 

And they sang - there was no stopping it, though Alfric would have been content to see all of creation come to an end rather than endure any more of this stuff - of the weapon-smiths of old and the weapons of their making. 

Ah, the weapons! 

Iron agleam in moonlight. Deathblades tempered in the blood of warfare. Ripple-patterned damascene slicing through the flesh of alien creatures ravenous for blood. The fighting fangs of heroes. Twist-patterned steel which has dared the hearts of heroes. Swords which lopped hands, which chopped feet, which shortened legs at the knees, which gouged out hearts and vivisected horses, which dissected the aorta and tasted the filth of the lower bowl. 

Of such the poets sang, much to the delight of the company of heroes.

 

a-gokhan-gultekin

Of swords they sang, and of armour. 

Bucklers proof against a baslisks breath. Meshed mail. Gaunt helms topped with boars and dragons. 

And the journeying, the endless trekking and marching and climbing endured by the thousands of heroes of legend, all of it to be described a footstep at a time, complete with descriptions of the texture of the mud through which they walked, and the very length of the leeches which there battened upon their flesh.* 

Earth was their way. Mud was their way. Ice was their way. Toes and hamstrings. Shins and shoulders. Corpses stretched lifeless. Lordless men manning the bulwark battlements. Heroes doomed to perish from the fiercest of griefs, dying encumbered by battle-harness, fighting in death in honour of their battle-vows, vaunting their boasts with the blood of their lungs on their lips." 

…

 

This is how he was raised, but who is Alfric Danbrog now and what has he become? He has become a Banker, a servant of the Circle of Banks, of whom we shall learn much later. What does it mean to be a Banker? It means clean clothes and clean floors, well-lit draughtless rooms, calm conversations, the manipulation of abstracts. It means this; 

“Maybe it would be possible to develop a kind of politics in which the great mass of the people would no longer be people at all. In which they would not be even animated rubbish or a lower form of animal life. Suppose one were to create abstract symbols to be manipulated as one manipulates money. Thus a stinking beggar, a leprous thing of rags and ulcerated bones, would no longer be an entity to be either cherished or scorned, helped or rebuffed. Rather, the beggar would be reduced to an abstract token, a necessary side-effect of the mathematics of prosperity. 

Was it possible? 

Was it possible for a ruling politics to be so detached from reality? 

Was it possible, in other words, for politics to be reduced to the painless manipulation of a web of symbols, an exercise of the intellect totally removed (in an emotional sense) from any realworld consequences? 

For a moment, Alfric thought it was possible, and thought too that he might be able to bring about such a state of affairs. But he dismissed the thought as an absurdity. 

Then began to reconsider. 

It happened that the Partnership Banks had already gone a long way to creating the necessary philosophical underpinning of any such politics; for the manipulating of money already proceeded in a largely abstract arena substantially divorced from all physical realities. Thus one very large and complex confederation of interlocked organizations was condicting its affairs, to a very considerable extent, as if it functioned in a symbolic field rather than a physical universe made of earth and air, fire and water. 

As money is today, so the world can be tomorrow. 

Thinking thus, Alfric shuddered; and he knew then his own true capacity for evil. 

Evil? 

Yes. 

Surely it would be evil in the highest degree to treat the real world as a solipsistic dream to be manipulated for symbolic satisfaction; and, on the level of practical affairs, to deny the existence of the real in favour of the mechanics of daydream. To puppet humans as if they were but shadows. It would be evil, yes. 

But it was infinitely appealing."

 …

 

Since Cook is now writing a character who by his nature is split half way between the Heroic Ideal and cold observation of it, he can write his own ambivalence directly into the story and now its character work! And since the protagonist is already questioning, rejecting yet also sometimes, embodying, the Heroic Ideal, Cook himself can relax a little and can allow himself to actually fulfil some of the core emotional axis of the story. 

 

The Cheese and the Quest 

Surely this be cringe? I hear you say. A were-Hamster? A milk-faced assassin with a social conscience? A sketchy knightly order verses a modern bank? A history of racial hatred against Orks, who turn out to be whale-like swamp dwelling perfectly intelligent and likeable folks with little sexual dimorphism and who are very helpful to the hero because he managed not to be racist to them? A Knight destined to be King who ends up not being king and not even a Banker? A feminist story in the background? An Ogre king called ‘King Dimple-Dumpling’?  What are these base Prachettisms? Can you truly be telling us that this is an actually good book???! 

Yes. For several reasons; 

Firstly, it is short; therefore, all of its good ideas ring out clearly, like pealing bells, spreading their immediate effect from one end of the text to the other, while its bad ideas, (if it can be said to have any), are rapidly quenched and forgotten. (As opposed to 'Wish & Wonder', where a compilation of complex techniques and characters combined to clog the book up, or 'Walrus & War-Wolf', which, while each element of its paratactic picaresque was fun, did lead to vague fatigue). 

Second; we are blessed with a sustained close-third-person tracking shot of a questing hero who is sent to do some things, and, while the plot beyond them, the themes, ideas and the sustained world, are revealed in increasing complexity, the hero does indeed do the actual things, and with some alacrity and drive. One always knows roughly where one is in ‘Werewolf & Wormlord’. That is; either on the way to the thing, doing the thing, or having done the thing. 

Third; we have a reasonably complex and sane protagonist! Not an egregious piece of shit like Sean Sarazin, nor a likeable but slow-witted dufus like Togura Poulaan, but a sane, intelligent, competent, not necessarily very pleasant but heroic and decent sometimes in a pinch Banker/Yudonic Knight, Alfric Danbog. A professional man in a childless bad marriage, (his fault), a complex relationship with his mildly estranged parents, a carefully hidden case of werewolfism and a Storied Fate awaiting him. 

Fourth; we have a much less agonising and neurotic synthesis between the heroic and the ironic, and  between the epic and political. Any Cook-Books are torn between Cooks joy and pleasure in epic fantastic storytelling and his political realism, grasp of psychology and mild (relatively) liberal neurosis about the Heroic Idea he clearly loves in his heart. 

While, on the surface, the story of the events of ‘Wolf & Worm’ might be taken to be pettily anti-heroic, (Alfric does not become King, all of the ruling social ideas are flawed), on a personal level, and as a man, he does actually face up to the terrible challenges facing him, and avoid becoming an utterly evil Banker or bad King. He escapes his bad marriage, (by which I mean his suffering wife who he treated terribly manages to escape him, which is better for both of them). He also manages to reconcile with his Father, his Mother, his Grandfather the King and together they manage to defeat the very terrible monster; Grendels Mother. A magical sword even drips to slathers in her noxious blood! 

 

The Classic Cookisms 

We have at least one hyper-surreal dream sequence and sex-dream with Witches. (I was about to say that this Cook protagonist is slightly unusual in that they are less insanely horny than most of the Young-Hero protagonists and even Justina Thrug, but I forgot that the crazed fever dream actually included a werewolf summoning and ritual Witch-sex, (this is never explained). Still he is marginally less horny than many Cook heroes and heroines.) 

 

The Thrug 

We also have the continued story of Justina Thrug. Having survived her escape from Untulchilamon, her Rise to Power in Wen Endex takes place in the background of this book, also the tiny dragons which were created by the Demon in the last book have managed to breed and become a whole new species, and are consistently charming. 

 

Cancer What The Hell? 

With Cook it’s always hard to tell what or how much of his protagonists Energy is His energy

sometimes it feels like he is writing out his own psycho-social meanderings, semi-mystical moments, dream visions, political musings etc . 

Towards the end of the book, one of the characters reveals that he has cancer and will soon die

It’s particularly horrible. 

“’Here, said Nappy, pulling his clothes away from his midriff. 

There Alfric had to look, had to, he had no choice, and it was cancer all right, cancer or some kind of lethal ulcer or something worse, yellow at the margins, yellow becoming brown, brown becoming wet black in the centre, and the centre was a kind of funnel that descended inward, inward to the wet pain and the glistening ooze. 

Then Nappy covered the thing once more.”

 ....

This was published in 1991. Hugh Cook dies of cancer in 2008.

 Cancer, and its terrible treatment, will return, far to the south, and long ago, in the city of Dalar Ken Halvar; 

 

PART THREE – Worshippers & Way

 Or - how I Became Mau'dib by Mistake 

I forgot exactly when we are but I do at least remember where. We have flown south from Wen Endex, across rectangular Moana, past the equatorial isle of Untulchilamon, to the vast somewhat-Australian ruined desert continent of Parengarenga, and to the dust-blasted city at its heart; Dalar Ken Halvar, city of the Silver Emperor, and home to the single still-active loci of technology and culture from the long-vanished science-fiction; the functional Combat College of the Starforce. 

 

The Stage and the Scene 

The scene of action and the axis of drama in 'Worshipper and Way' is, so far as I can tell, utterly original, I haven't seen anything like it before, and produces and strange, dreamlike feel unique to this book. 

20,000 years ago Olo Malan was part of a Star-Trek/Ian.M.Banks-Culture dimension-spanning hyper-culture called 'The Nexus'. Then the star gate connecting this world to the Nexus collapsed and it fell into savagery- through endless cycles of brief renaissance followed by post-singularity hyperdoom. 

The only part of this world where the technology and the ideology of the Nexus still works even a little like before is the Combat College buried in the mountains of the city of Dara Ken Halvar. 

Within this complex, and only here, we have replicators, post-future medicine, virtual reality training machines, somewhat chilly comfort, sliding doors, materialising doors, clean electrical lights and an an omnipresent A.I., with the image and personality of a long-gone individual. Making it, in effect, a character. In a way, a strange Prince of the City. But the only thing the Combat College wants to do, it’s only directive, is to train Star Troopers for the Star Force. A Star Force that no longer exists.. but might one day exist again, if the Chasm Gates are ever re-opened

 

Outside the matter-energy doors of the Combat College, the sprawling desert city of Dara Ken Halvar is a multiethnic deeply stratified powderkeg under the rule of the often-absent, often depressed Silver Emperor - the acknowledged ruler of the massive, and massively poor and desertfied continent of Parengarenga. Dara Ken Halvar is filled with beggars, debts, cults and ethnic resentment, and with little water, all of which has to be carried up, by hand, from the river below which runs to nothing in the Plain of Jars beyond. Great gogmagogian vents and abyssal shafts break the surface, relics of long-crazed weather machines, one dead, the other spewing endless heat. They have eyeless beggars and a ceremonial dog-killing festival. It is a savage nation, of the kind the crew of Star Trek might beam down to in disguise so as not to break the Prime Directive, though depicted with more complexity, subtlety, sympathy and horror than Star Trek usually leant to its adventure-zone cultures. 

Every year, a bunch of (relative) savages from the desert city of Dara Ken Halvar, come into the Combat College as Cadets, and over subsequent years of education they are whittled down and trained up as hyper-competent Star Troopers of the Stormforce, ready for anything from surviving on a jungle moon to battling with space-fighters, to taking command of a super space battleship, none of which they will ever see. They are also trained and educated in the ideology and history of the Nexus. Once the graduating class has achieved its highest level, they are sent back out into desert, dog-eating, blind-beggar city of Dara Ken Halvar, and forgotten, having been trained as Star Troopers. 

The action of the book takes place across this strange boundary between a dreamlike lost post-future and the savage, but very real and consequential, ethno-politics of a shrivelled primitive desert empire run by an actual Wizard. 

What things mean changes as you go through the matter-energy doors of the Combat College. All of the politics, starvation and ethnic conflict of the Real World infiltrates the clean Star Trek halls and the strange, now twenty-millennia-old philosophies and conflicts of the Nexus, themselves seep out into Dara Ken Halvar, mutating and mestatising into strange new forms. 

This would make a really good stage play. 

 

The Hero and the Heretic 

While our point of view does float a little, the main object of our story is Asodo Hatch; an ostensibly powerful man. Hatch is a purple-skinned Frangoni warrior. He trained in the Comat College and, in the tradition of his people, took a break to go and fight in the actual, brutal desert dust and bloodstained spear warfare of Parengarenga. Unlike most of the Cadets of the Combat College, he is in middle years, with actual military experience. He is a tall, handsome, muscular man with an impressive topknot. A leader in his community, he is a direct servant of the Silver Emperor and is in contention for the instructorship of the Combat College; a rare and singular role that gives one permanent access to the College as its de-facto ambassador to Dara Ken Halvar. His main challenger? The brilliant and ruthless Embrell Islander, Lupus Lon Oliver. Only one can succeed! 

But Asado Hatch is not fighting to succeed, he is fighting to survive. His father recently committed suicide, causing massive shame to the family, his brother has disavowed the family, his sister is in massive debt, sufficient to get her enslaved, and is involved with a crazy cult, his wife has terminal cancer which is killing her slowly - the only treatment is expensive and illegal opium - everything is mortgaged to the hilt and his family position, for which, as a Frangoni, he is solely responsible, is a crazy house of cards which could come down at any moment. 

To anyone looking at him from the outside, Hatch is the protagonist of a great political and military saga, and that is often how people treat him; as the protagonist, the man who has a plan, who is going to make things happen. 

Asodo Hatch is not an anti-hero but a null-hero. To most of the people in the story he seems like a 'main character', a driver of events and embodier of the historic moment - and in this book he is in fact the main character, but within his own mind he feels utterly helpless, driven relentlessly by tangled webs of outside forces, all of which mutually conflict with each other and none of which he has any time to adapt to, having to improvise relentlessly in the moment, moment-by-moment. Even until the final pages of the book his actual core beliefs and core ideology, remains negotiable to circumstance. 

The interrelationship of debt, wealth, economics, politics and a simultaneous synthesis of deeply human emotion reminds me a lot of Sylvia Townsend Warners multi-generational convent story 'The Corner that Held Them'. Its relatively rare that a writer can deal simultaneously in personal psychology, family dynamics, debt, money, low and high level politics and often sincere and conflicting religious and ethical impulses at the same time.

Like ‘Wolf & Worm’, this is another protagonist caught between cultures - a man who, in a sense, believes in nothing, or comes to almost believe in nothing, like I imagine Cook to be; he knows too much of the flaws and failures and invisible compromises of too many different cultures and too many different ways of life to be a thoughtless intuitive believer in any of them. But a believer is what he must become, or pretend to be, for only absolute belief will save him.

 

 

The Tragedy of the Triumph 

While Alfric Danbrog fails in the material and power sense, becoming neither King, nor Senior Banker, he does manage to keep his soul and restore and renew his sense of self. 

Asodo Hatch wins in the end. He beats Lupus Lon Oliver, gets his wife healed of her cancer, protects his Daughter, (and his lover), regains a relationship with his brother, betrays his ancestral god, and any of the good aspects of the Nexus culture, sells his honour, massacres those who trusted him and becomes the keystone of a successful revolutionary theocratic revolution, for a misogynist faith twenty thousand years old, originally revealed only though his criticism of it. A faith he does not believe in but for which he commits terrible crimes, because he believes it is the only way. 

By the end of the story, he has lost his soul. He is the apparent Master of the hour but feels utterly hollow. He will spread the tyrannical religion of Nu-Chala-Nuth across the whole of Parengarenga and beyond and use its tyrannical autocratic power to begin the rebuilding of a technological society which can repair the Combat College, which will then spread life-altering Post-Future technology and medicine to the whole of Olo Malan. 

It will all be to the good, in the end, hopefully, after maybe a couple of hundred years. Hopefully.  

"'I have unleashed a religion militant. I have set loose the Nu-Chala-Nuth. My people have consecrated themselves by blooding their swords in the service of faith. I am acclaimed as a Saint already.' 

Unconsciously, Hatch let declamatory passion seep into his voice as he delivered himself of this speech. He spoke as if he addressed an audience of seventy thousand. Rhetoric was ever a Frangoni vice, and Hatch was true to the ways of his people: there was nothing he liked better than to unleash a speech. 

'So,' said Shona softly. 'It can trick, cheat and kill. Oh, and make speeches! Great speeches, Hatch are you proud of your speech, are you proud of... aagh! Whats the use? You've decided, haven't you? 

'I did what I had to,' said hatch defensively. 

Yet he was uncomfortably conscious of his guilt burden. He had brought the Free Corps to destruction, yet many of those people ... well ... Hatch has trained with them, had known them as companions and colleagues ... and ... he had feared for the future, hence the arranged murder. But was it not perhaps better to risk the future than to do something which was ... was what? Unpardonable? 

Suddenly, very sharply, hatch remembered Lupus Lon Oliver. Lupus had said that a man who kills himself hands to his son a sharp sword. 

'I will not do it,' muttered Hatch. 

But... 

'I have heard that the Nu-Chala-nuth is no Way for women,' said Shone suddenly. 

'It is true,' admitted Hatch. 

'Then what future for women?' said Shona. 

Hatch was about to say that the women must suffer what they must. Then caught himself. because - of course! - Shona herself was a woman. 

This came as something of a revelation to Hatch. For Asodo hatch had never thought of the burly Shona as a woman, just as he had never thought of her as being one of the Pang, or one of the Yara,the Unreal - though she was all of those. he had always thought of Shona as being, well, Shona. His ally. His friend. 

'The men must have something,' said Hatch lamely."

 …

 

 If ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’ is about the end of an Age of Darkness, then it is a deeply realist, and quite tragic, look at what it takes to actually create states and empires, impose peace, unify peoples and in short, to restore civilisation. For it cannot be done by civilised means. 

 

The New Nexus Naughtiness 

'Worshippers & Way' plays a game of long, slow reveals, reveals of both what is going on right now, and the motivations of the people involved. One of the deepest of these is the slow drip-feeding of ever more information about the Nexus. 

Hatch himself, raised in the frozen culture of the Nexus and educated in its history, strongly suspects it no longer exists; likely collapsed and fallen into chaos long ago, unable to sustain its own dichotomies. The Narrator itself refers to the Nexus as something like an Empire of High Riding Energy Lords. 

For the power of the Nexus comes from its near-magical technology, and the power of its technology comes from its ability to manipulate probability, (like the Wizards of Argan do today), and how does this technology work? It is born from the mazadath; semi-magical hyper-chip like chunks of gemlike matter that lie at the heart of every significant piece of Nexus tech. 

And whence the mazadath? Why the Nexus trades for them, with a curious race of hyper-dimensional aliens called ‘The Shining Ones’. 

In fact the Nexus cannot even manufacture its own technological base and does not fundamentally understand how it works. 

And whence the Shining Ones? Well.. Guest Gulkan, warlord of Tameran, finds that out in a conversation with God in the next book. The last book! 

But before that, one more quote...

 

The Justice and the Justification 

Maybe the editors were complaining, or Cook was finally getting letters about this stuff, or perhaps, writing in a bubble as he did, his mind simply began to turn thusly, for here begins the moral argument, and justification for his work, here at the end of ‘Worshippers & Way’ not from an epistolaric in-world figure, but from the disembodied Narrator. 

“It is doubtlessly true that, in a strictly moral universe, Asodo Hatch would not have ended thus in the arms of the Lady Iro Murasaki. But this is a history of the world of the fact and the flesh, not a gaudy tale of Good versus Evil such as might have been candyflossed to life by the Eye of Delusions. This, then, is not a nicely balanced structure of error and retribution suitable for use as a model to propound the ethical philosophies. It is history, and it is not for history to take upon itself the mission of the moralists. 

But if some mission be demanded, if it be said that the mere recounting of events is not a task sufficient in itself – why, then, let this history be taken as an exemplification of the intrinsic complexity of life. If a message be required, why then, let the very complexities of this history be a message in itself. And if something more still be demanded – a moral, perforce! – why then, let the moral be that life is a dice game played in the shadows with a dog and a ghost. 

Consider by the light of that moral the life of Asodo Hatch. In the time of his testing, Asodo Hatch used means which he did not rightly know were at his disposal to achieve ends which were not strictly of his own choosing. He was swimming, yes, and swimming of his own free will, and in the direction of his choosing – but he was swimming in a river that was in flood, a boiling river of filthy brown water ever churning towards the hot pit of its final embroilment. 

And we too in our time may be plunged into such a flood; and therefore should no be too quick to judge, or to say that Hatch should have drunk the river dry, or should have grown wings and flown, or should have conceded himself to the flood by evolving himself into a fish. 

Let us then grant him the charity of our mercy. 

And if it be objected that Hatch, whether swimming or drowning, had no right to live when so many were dead – why then, know that it takes only a moment’s courage to die, whereas it takes a lifetimes’ courage to live. And Asodo Hatch had the greatest of difficulty in finding that lifetimes courage, for the undeniable truth is that his father had handed him both a sharpened sword and the incentive to use it.”

 .......

PART FOUR – Witchlord & Weaponmaster

We are finally here, the sad too-early end for the doomed glorious megaproject of the Chronicle of the Age of Darkness. An age which now may never end. 

What on earth were you thinking Hugh Cook? TWENTY books in the FIRST series? And THREE series? You were not thinking at all, at least, not of things like sale and audience appeal, and this is why we love you. It is also why you need a kicking. 

Still, this is our end and we shall accept it. I will do a grand summation but for now I will try to keep things focused on Guest Gulkan and on the story of this book alone. But before even that get a load of this;

“Shabble drifted through the air towards the Witchlord. The fist-sized bubble pressed itself against the Witchlord's cheek, rolled up the Witchlords face, bumped over the ridges of the Witchlords slanting forehead, shone a tightly focused  beam of light into the mysterious recesses of the Witchlords bat-wing ears, then rolled down his back, ducked between his legs, and slid upwards through the air till they were (so to speak) face to face once more.

'Welcome to my island,' said Shabble.”

 ....

He (they)’ s Back Baby! More Shabble incoming!

 

 

More Wizards, One Warrior 

And we are back. Back for a synthesis and expression of nearly every theme and method in the series so far. Like the first book, Witch & Weapon focuses on the epic journeys of some Wizards, mainly Stelt-Pitilikin, the levitating tutor of our hero, and Guest Gulkan, son of the Witchlord and (eventually), heir to the empire. The violent scholars and somewhat scholarly violators are our main characters and we see the world through their eyes, and through the interaction between them;

“'I'll take no talk of sense from a schoolteacher, which is all you are,' said Guest. 'I'm an emperors on and heir to an empire myself. I'm oath-bound to rescue Jocasta, and so I will'. 

'You are not oath-bound at all,' said Senk. 'You are not oath-bound because Jocasta lied to you. The thing cannot make you a wizard. it can only control you, possess you, seize you, subject you. Use you as a tool, a thing.' 

'But it bound itself to me in honour.' Said Guest. 

'It has no honour!' Said Senk. 'Honour is - how can I put this? You're mortal, you die, you seek significance in the face of mortality, you seek a meaning. The oath-culture is quest for precisely that: significance in the face of mortality. The honour of a mans death is the meaning of that death. Jocasta shares no such fear of death, hence needs the support of no such culture, hence cannot be trusted to hold to an oath. Do you understand? 

'You are a schoolmaster,' said Guest 'hence have an ethnological temperament. But a thing - you're like Sken-Pitilkin. What's it all about, that's what you want to say. Then you riddle out a meaning, then you say because it’s got a meaning it’s got no meaning. First you shape the thing in words, then you say the thing's only words so it’s nothing. But things are things despite any number of words, and a thing is good in itself. My horse, my woman, my honour, my sword. My honour -' 

'Your honour is not a thing,' said Senk, with crushing force. 'You confuse categories. You confuse your horse with your honour when your horse is a flesh and blood animal with mass, weight and an appetite for hay, whereas your honour is a cultural construct, which is something quite different.' 

'Yes, well,' said Guest, not appreciating that he had just been crushed under one of the heavier hammers in the intellectual toolbox, 'you're talking categories, but it’s just like breaking up a bit of bread, you get big bits and small bits but it’s all bread when you're finished with it.’”

 … 

 

The Boy, and Beyond 

In 'Words & War', 'Walrus & War-Wolf' and 'Wicked & Witless' we saw the growth of a teenage boy, through adventure and travail, to the state of manhood and (some), depth, (apart from Sean Sarazin, who remained a tool). 

So does 'Witch & Weapon' give us Guest Gulkan as the precocious murdering horny 14 year old son of an Emperor, and take us through his many, many failings, his dooms and dramas, loves and losses, till, seemingly slowly, (for the story covers perhaps a good 20 years), he emerges as a relatively sensible, (for a murdering Yarglat Barbarian), man.

 

We stay with Guest for much longer than we saw Togura Poulaan, Drake Deldragon Douhey and Sean Sarazin and because of this his story is deeper and lonelier. His life-arc takes us more into that of the middle-aged heroes of later books like Justina Thrug and Asado Hatch, with the sorrow that Guest Gulkan never really has a stable home, being driven, largely by his own impetuous energy, on a series of crazed adventures, through his teens and 20's and into his 30's, where he seems he would really prefer that things would calm down, but they don't. 

 

The Father and the Failure 

Themes of fatherhood and especially relationships between flawed fathers and odd sons have been present in much of ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’. 

Togura was overshadowed and ignored. Drake was orphaned, his guardian, driven mad by Drake and by Syphilis, consistently tries to annihilate him. His second father-figure, John Arabin, is a conniving, deadly but somewhat honourable and rarely sadistic pirate king from whom Drake learns a lot. Poor, awful Sean Sarazin is raised by the Randian and manipulative Lord Regan, with disastrous results, and one of his few happy periods, and times in which he is not an utter dick, is hanging out with his biological father in his forest guerilla revolutionary corps. Alfric Dambrog was Wormlord' is estranged but reconciles  Asodo Hatch was tortured by the suicide of his own father in the arena before the start of the book. 

So this is 'Father and Son', Episode Six. A story of two men tortured by ambition and empathy. The Witchlord, Onash Gulkan, a man who murdered most of his own family to become Emperor, (normative for the culture, as the Wizards would say), has three Sons, and finds himself somewhat distressed by the gradually-curdling certainty that his sons will not only end up murdering each other, but will kill him too, and that it will be Guest that does this, for, though an utter tool at the age of 14, he is the bravest, the strongest, the most cunning and has the strongest will-to-power. A man born of family, slayer of the same family, wrestles with his genuine love for his sons and his own Doom, and his own refusal to die, for old though he is, he is still Kingly, and has a Kings will. 

Our story really starts with the simultaneous awareness by Guest and his Father, that Guest will kill his Onash, and follows them wrestling with and against that fate over a consequential reach of history.

 

From Guests perspective, this is a classic tale, even a Greek drama, of a boy destined to fight and kill his father, escaping that fate, losing everything, actually getting to spend time with his dad and growing closer, until fate catches up in the end. 

Taking us back to 'Wizards and Warriors', and one of the grand over-themes of the Cook-Books, this is also a story of.. 

 

THE GOGMAGOGIC GIGANTISM! 

Not since 'Walrus & War-Wolf' have we had a hero who travels so madly and so wildly, by foot, by horse, by ship and now by magical gate and Wizardly flying machine! His stage is the whole of the world! (At least the bits we’ve already seen, and a few more as well). 

I'm not sure this makes the story better! At least 'as a story'. The back of the book informs us; "Although it forms part of a vast fantasy epic, this volume is a complete and spectacular tale in its own right." And this has never been less true! The book 'as-a-book' is pretty good, but if you haven't read the others then will seem sketchy tale indeed. The core to the story, if there is one, is stretched like mozzarella over such a crazy compilation of nations, kingdoms, Banks, oceans, wars, betrayals, imprisonments, mutilations, trans-dimensional gates and a four year long marriage, that it would be hard to make out. 

If you have read the other books, (and it’s hard to imagine someone reading this one without the others), then 'Witch and Weapon' is a grand condensation, very like the crazy 'War-Wolf & Walrus' in its physical range of adventure and in how it acts as twine that ties together hugely disparate events and people and makes clear firstly; yes this is all ONE STORY and everything interacts, and secondly; "Yes I HUGH COOK did indeed plan all this from the very beginning! Remember this bit from that book and that bit from this book? Well here we are! It all comes together now!! SEE?" 

If we are to be anal about it, he planned for twenty books in the first series alone, so not everything comes together, the story still has a wonderous superfluity of loose ends everywhere, but a LOT does. I found myself, in the middle of the story, skipping back five or six books, to read the same scene as I was reading in 'Witch & Weapon', seen from the other point of view. It’s pretty impressive. It may be a unique achievement. 

 

The (mild) Metatextual Madness! 

The Cook-Books have always elements of meta-textuality threaded through them. Right from the beginning there are things like 'translators notes' in which the floating third-person narrator elbows their way in to comment on a translation or the meaning of a world. 

This tendency reached its crazed apogee in 'Wazir & Witch'. Things cool off a bit for 'Wish & Wonders', which still maintains itself to be an in-world text, but less assaulted by either madness or academics, (but I think the original 'text' of Wazir & Witch shows up in Wish & Wonder as part of the plot???  Cook god damn you. 

‘Werewolf & Worm’ and 'Worshippers & Way' recede somewhat to the usual Cook-Style of floating close third person with occasional interjections. But here at the end we get a return to the Epistolary conceit with the gradual awareness that the book itself is being written by one of the characters in it; the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin, a Wizard who, the book assures us, never really did anything wrong and always had everyone’s best interests at heart, and only occasionally tried to run away to save his own skin. The narrator, narrating the conversations of Sten-Pitilkin, is wise enough to note that the adult Guest Gulkan remembers elements of his own youth quite differently to what he, and we, saw through the pages of the text at the time. The narrator does not seem aware that we also saw the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin do a number of very questionable things, (at the time), and adopt some attitudes that the narrator might not agree with, which he later seems to’ just kinda forget’. 

 

The Necrotic Nexus 

Guest meets God in this one. Or at least, an extra-dimensional being with simultaneous access to all points in local space and time and a perhaps infinite level of knowledge to bestow. It might be a demiurge, or an angel, or a Metatron or something. It calls itself ‘The Lobos’.

"'I was upset,' said the Lobos, now sounding sad rather than angry, 'because the thing which you have about your neck is a thing stolen from one of the Zelamith. Know you the Zelamith?" 

'were a race of whispering dragons which lived in the places which do not exist, the places which lie between cosmos and cosmos. For each of the Zelamith there was a mazadath. And a mazadth, dear child of man, a mazadath is a soul. It is like a harp: as the harp is nothing on its own, yet comes to life when in concord with the harpist, so the mazadath is nothing on its own, yet comes to life when in a synergetic relationship with one of the Zelamith. The Zenalith were slaughtered by the Shining Ones, the Vangelis, who butchered them, then sold their souls to humankind for trifles.'" 

… 

Well well fucking well. It seems the entire interdimensional culture of the Nexus was built on the corpses of murdered aliens, and perhaps they never even knew.

 

The Agony and the Amelioration 

Let’s count again. One - Morgan Hearst and his growth-arc from a Wizard-Hating Rovac warrior to maybe something else. Two - Alfric Danbrog, a man separated from his northern quest-saga knightly culture, and his parents, and drawn into the more Cosmopolitan evils of the Bank, finding some kind of equanimity towards the end. Three - Asodo Hatch, Frangoni Warrior, Patriarch and slave to the Silver Emperor, but also Star Trooper of the Combat College, a man torn always between competing cultural drives. 

So this is Cultural Alienation, Episode Four. Guest Gulkan has the heart, and balls, and stomach, and mighty EARS of a true Yarglat Barbarian, but he was raised as much by the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin as he was by anyone, who also has a claim to 'Fatherhood' on the boy, and Guests wide-ranging experiences across the world, his many encounters with the super-and extra-natural, his many languages, including the ever-despised irregular verbs, gradually displace him from being a 'pure' Yarglat into something Other. This might be the Other of Kingship, but even so it is a lonely place to be. Unlike the Wizards, he is not part of a semi-immortal confraternity. He can never really go home and just be Yarglat again. 

Was Cook a culturally displaced person. Based purely on Wikipedia, it’s hard to tell. Growing first in England, then living on a tiny tropical island for what feels like some very consequential years of his youth, then to New Zeland where he was in the army, but as a medic, essentially the 'Wizard' to the 'Warriors'; one of them, a healer amongst killers. Then a writer, a father, a teacher in Japan, a Cancer Patient.  If the Age of Darkness is a Guide, Cook was never at home at home. 

Still, it is partly through this alienation-from-self that actual growth is allowed to take place. Olo Malan is in trouble! The Swarms have taken Argan! Nothing works! An ordinary Yarglat Barbarian is not going to cut it! Neither is an ordinary Pirate, Yudonic Knight, Wormlord, Frangoin Warrior or Banker. The world needs new souls and the only way to make a new soul from the ones you’ve got is to start cutting. 

… 

"So remember, when you find yourself in the presence of a happily loquacious old soldier, that he is but a victim of selective amnesia - a fact which may be amply proved by asking him to narrate for you the manner of the death of those of his friends who took the longest to die."

 ..... 

 

 

 

PART FIVE – The Cease and the Substance 

“One of the terrors of human existence is that, as we get older, the world loses its solidity and stability which it possessed during childhood, then the existing order seemed absolute. Indeed, to a wizard, the world seems at times a sheer phantasmagoria, in which empires shift, deform, and melt like fog in the sun, and in which the very gods themselves change the faces which they show to humanity as they endure their evolution”. – (likely) Sten-Pitilkin 

…

 

You can kind of lose your shit when you remember that outright child abusers with less talent wrote less books and had more success than Hugh Cook, who died of cancer in 2008. 

Let’s try not to. Instead, like a Wizard rather than a Warrior, let us consider; 

Hugh Cook consistently and brilliantly wrote books that people didn’t want in a register and form that they were probably never going to understand. He wrote in a bubble as perfect, playful, brilliant and indifferent as Shabble. His bubbleation is part of what made him interesting. He was probably never going to be a big commercial success. 

He also couldn’t write believers, curiously. While he never treats religion with contempt, and is usually sympathetic to the spiritual yearnings which support it, I don’t think he ever wrote a religion from the inside so to speak. All faiths were one to Cook, or simply different species of animal. 

What then, did he do? 

The first is perhaps not the most important, but is the simplest to explain; he created a ten-volume fantasy epic in which all of the characters and events interweave in one simultaneous and concurrent story, so that you can turn back to a book written four years previously and read conversations and interactions that cross years in real time. No-one has done this before or since. It is an achievement unique in fiction. (Disprove me in the comments if you can). 

He wrote stories of deep political, social and  psychological realism in the most fantastic and unreal setting. He wrote men, (and some women), of often bad, always flawed, character, but took us through their dark lives without surrendering to either cynicism or sentimentality. His empathy for humanity never wavered, nor did his eye glisten with bubbling tears, he showed us only what-was, but with a clear sympathy that told us we should value even that, and value it more because that is what is really there, not what we dream or imagine is there. 

He showed us the structures, empires, faiths, horrors, trauma, failures and sacrifices that might be involved if you had to actually, really, save a world. 

Perhaps most importantly, while refusing to lie to us about anything that mattered, he lied beautifully about everything else, which must surely be the gold standard for a writer. 

He had a lot of dream sequences. Like a lot a lot. I don’t know if there is any volume without one and many have several. I’m not complaining. Many are the best parts of the books they are in and I took a word from one for the title of this essay; ‘Zaan, said the sun’. Still, there are a lot of visionary dream sequences. (And a fair amount of sun-worship.) 

He wrote a lot of horny teenage boys. It felt like a whole load. Really maybe a ridiculous amount. There was a lot of horny in these books. He also had a pretty regular, almost ongoing, dialogue between the Soldier and the Scholar, always wearing different faces and leading different lives, but in some ways the same conversation and the same argument, over the nature and truth of violence and its place in our world. 

He created a world! Olo Malan of the Tulip Continuum! Land of the multicoloured stars. Home to bloodstone Injiltaprajura, Dara Ken Halvar, the city of the Sun. He made all of Argan, of Parengarengea and Yestron, Tameran and the Ravilish Lands! 

He unfortunately wrote Sean Sarazin, aka WATASHI! However he also wrote Yen Olass, Drake Deldragon Douhey and Shabble, which goes some way to putting him in the black. He also put maybe way too many ideas, characters, plotlines and crosshatching literary techniques into ‘Witch & Wazir’, but I tell you what that book is a vibe and, as Steln-Pilitkin would say;

 “The parchment holds the ink, and holds it for all time. So if the date be lost in the first reading, then it will be found in the second.

 A second reading! 

Is the historian truly counselling a second reading of his works? 

Yes he is! And shamelessly! 

Let it be clearly stated that a second reading is not just to be recommended but is, rather, close to being compulsory. For this is a True History, one which faithfully stives to render the tangled complexities of life itself. To unknot the tangles of this interweaving in a single reading will not be easy. After all, the events confused their very victims, so how should they be clearcut plain to the onlooker? 

Read then this history a second time! 

…..

 

He (presumably), organised his notes wonderfully, though, it seems even the ever-perspicuous Cook may indeed have lost track of some of the plot thread of some of the more intensely complicated tangles; 

“… if you think it a long story, and a weary one, and one quite unnecessary for the performance of this history, why, then blame not the poor historian. Blame rather a nitpicking tradition of jealous and intellectually impoverished scholarship which lacks the ability to appreciate the grander of a full-scale historical tapestry, and therefore devotes itself to picking loose any undefended thread at the corner of such a tapestry.' 

Having thus defended this particular thread, let us return to the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin.”  - likely Hjosta Sten-Pitilkin

The Needful Knowledge

Long ago I made you a promise which I have not forgotten. The secret of ‘Zaan, Olo Malan!’ The final and ultimate piece of wisdom that Hugh Cook would want you to take away from this epic saga! Know then, this; 

“... know then the wound! First, one must look, for only by looking can one know. One must seek for the damage, remembering always that piercing weapons – one thinks in particular of a quarrel shot from a crossbow – will damage with both instrike and outstrike. 

Having found hole or holes, raggages or cleavages, tears and rips, gouges and gaps, one must path the same. And immediately! Have you no bandage? Then your hand must serve! But unless one be naked, the one surely has bandages, for the cloth off ones back will serve when all else fails. The cleaner the cloth, the better, though the cleanest of cloth is no use to a washerwoman who has died of bloodloss while the ardent hygienist has been searching for sterility. 

Say it of certainty: in the face of bleeding, the rescuer must match the urgency of the pumping heart. The wound must be patched, and immediately. 

So when you are at war, and your bloodbrother has his swordhand hacked away by a battleaxe, then do not hesitate. First kill the axe-wielder. Then wipe the filth of battle from the palm of your hand, and clamp that living flesh of yours to the pumping agony of your bosom friend. It can be done in moment, if you have the courage to save as well to kill.

Press your hand to the hot wet pumpage of blood. Press hard, and crush the bloodflow down to nothing. Then keep your hand in place until some hard-panting hero of your acquaintance can spare a few moments from his saga-work to assist with a bandage. Then you had best seek the help of a healer, though the perversity of the world is such that you may find every available pox doctor to have been slaughtered in the first heat of battle. 

If such be the case, then your friends handless arm should for the moment be placed in a sling, so that the well-bandaged wound is kept elevated, for the heart finds it harder to pump blood to elevations. And – mind! – do not allow the wound to be dipped in liquid ordure, or steeped in boiling lead, or packed with red mud, or plunged into the sexual aperture of a menstruating cow.  ……

 

…… And if you believe yourself likewise doomed to go to war, then know this of a certainty: if your study in its folly concerns itself with the mere use of weapons then you too are doomed to stand some day in helpless guilt, watching as the object of your pity dies. So let this text then carry an explicit message, a message apt for our age of ceaseless warfare: those who would study the use of weapons should study likewise the cure of that use.”