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bestworstcase · 5 months ago

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@spinner335

(general lore musing) does the Wolf not allow people to be unmade as they (both the Wolf and the person) want to be? The only non Splinter name we know of is Coelle, who drowned herself. Maybe the Wolf doesn’t let them have oblivion, because it cannot achieve it. Hurting them by denying them what they desire and can achieve unlike it. Hmmm do you think the Wolf sponsors the creation of the Great Bell that Tolls the Ending of the Hours? Hmm do you think if one part of a dyad commits the crime, both parties transform, because they are so fundamentally linked?

CONSPIRACY GUY DOT GIF. fuck ok.

cliff notes

key texts – cultsim:

mausoleum of wolves (full expedition text + all non-random loot incl. velshorn inscriptions; note every book pertains to the lithomachy, not the intercalate)

tower revek (full expedition text + all non-random loot; note 1. exile description for bitterblack salt is "pinch of this goes up like lightning-struck thermite" and 2. the wolf-divided’s tarot is the tower, depicted traditionally as a tower or a tree struck by lightning)

orthos wood (full expedition text + all non-random loot)

keglin’s scratch (full expedition text + all non-random loot + medium’s remnant, wolfshead, which provides the splendid memory)

chateau raveline (expedition text matters more than the loot but note the cinnabar amulet and greydawn oil)

a star-shattered fane (full expedition text + non-random loot; tangentially relevant, this is where the forge shattered the flint)

rite of the beast’s division + rite of the rebel striving

lore: exile edge (neutral/wolf path, note that the foe considers beidde a name of the colonel but he’s wrong, beidde is the wolf’s + lionsmith’s shattered mysteries). winter. forge. illuminate mysteries (lantern 14). formulae ophidian (knock 10). anthic elaborations (grail 12).

influences: all moth. all forge. all winter.

tools: dappled mask. cinnabar amulet. meteoric bullet, beidde’s blade. all winter tools (note connection suggested in TLA between bone flute and the sea specifically). kingskin bodhrán.

various priest dreams/scars and sermons. various mainline cultist dreams. various dancer sendings and balance ending.

book of hours skills – i cannot possibly list all of them but these are the most crucial:

sky stories, sea stories, wolf stories, snow stories. rhyme & remembrance, anbary & lapidary(note anbary means ‘lightning’), preliminal meter, sights & sensations, quenchings & quellings, ragged crossroads, putrefactions & calcinations, hill & hollow, transformations & liberations, sickle & eclipse (note mirroring with sky: matters of balance, necessity and rebuke vs matters of balance, harmony and necessity).

basically every nectar skill but we don’t have time for the calyptra tangent rn

most craftable items and memories using these skills, and patterns therein.

book of hours Things and Rooms (most crucial items only)

xanthotic and iotic essence (NOTE MELANCTHE’S HERETICAL "TRUE FORGE OF DAYS" BIT on iotic)

as above, so below painting. bust of st melancthe

hall of division + mirrors + eva and abraham painting. desk: eva. pale chamber. all of gullscry tower.

all of nina lagasse’s paintings but especially rose, sky, winter (note that nina lagasse is 1. a name of the wolf, 2. ninegala of lagash, 3. probably nyn, and 4. possibly the fucking postmistress)

stymphlings. eva’s bust.

books, a selection as concise as i can make it in addition to the ones found in the vaults listed above:

eva’s treasury. one hundred and eight. ettery after. lady eva’s repose. a pale lady and a prince of wines. the crossing to noon. to a pale lady.

a child’s treasury of golden afternoons (+ numen and archaeologist endings). the velletri interviews. wakefield papers 1902: skolekosophy.

towards a fundamental aesthetic, both editions (+numens and endings)

black nephrite. a true history of valentine dewulf.

the other eye of the serpent

shuritic book of suns (+ numen)

the sun disfigured (+ numen)

in the mountains…, observations on the peacock door. nyn’s cages. the scar in the sky. the sky in the scar.

the lion and the glass, each flame his fuel, the focus of amber.

an investigation of a foundered country.

a tower rises. a tower falls.

on the white.

the black, white, & red books of brittany

chione at abydos

five creations. (+from nowhere origin determination which gives sky/forge)

the dream of the conspiracy of the lower skies. a catalogue of uncharted pleasures.

basically all incidents/visitors but yvette, connie, serena, coseley, mopsy, and bancroft are worth paying particular attention to.

<- this is a non-inclusive and fairly conservative list. read everything!!!

two things to keep in mind: 1. any time you see a reference to ‘twins’ or twinning, it is either the sister-and-witch OR the entity cygnifer refers to as the joined serpent; 2. the serpent is lightning is melancthe’s "true forge of days" (<- this is why anbary & lapidary can make everything it does) so you have to always be asking and which forge are you referring to.

wheeze. ok. i’m not going to go through any of the analysis and corkboarding for all that and more but those are the core sources ANYWAY

the first two hours were sky (the monarch-at-the-crossroads, the thirty birds) and sea. birds of a feather, worms of a scale. gods-from-stone in between. the lithomachy and the intercalate are twin events—cyclical—a repeating pattern, this is a wolf thing. sea and sky were separated (<- the thritige-kind dreamed themselves out of nowhere and became sky, the primordial ocean opened like a mouth, speech the first wound etc) and sought to recombine.

to do that,

sky stilled the winds which carried the moon around the sky. moon plummeted to earth and exploded—that’s the forge of days, a meteor a la chicxulub impact—inciting the lithomachy. sky/sea conjoined and ate each other and became one; the serpent, the wolf, the beast, the storm. it’s called the crime of the sky as in the crime the sky committed. (the elegiast and the beach-comber are gods-who-were-flesh, names of sky who ascended to hourhood in a similar manner to the solar hours after the lithomachy. sky is/was the black dove and white raven)

as above/so below is the serpent’s whole thing—as below (in nowhere), so above (in the mansus) and also as above (in the glory), so below (in the mansus)—there are always conjunctions in both directions. this also seems to happen in time, as before/so again, which seems to mean that every…manifestation of sky/sea/wolf exists concurrently in some liminal way

(also the serpent’s mouth is the serpent gate / the spider’s door / the wrong door. hence why the great hooded princes were twinned when they passed through it. this is why the librarian can, for example, recite sea’s enactments at the sea’s edge.)

ANYWAY. intercalate. the forge of days wanted union with the sun-in-splendour and instead divided him (although they did join through their proxies, swan king and sunset celia)—which which also divided the serpent for VARIOUS REASONS (<- mainly the forge of days is to sky as the swan king is to the forge and the sun-in-splendour is to sea as sunset celia was to the sun-in-splendour) and that. caused the wolf-divided (as above) and snow (so below). gestures vaguely at wolf-snow. the sun was never interred in the mausoleum of wolves because the mausoleum was not built for the sun-in-splendour. it was built for the wolf.

clutches head. anyway the chandler is/will be a wolf spider and she both does and does not exist already (as the rising spider. dawn. rising spider. dawn. rising–) but when she does become it will be through the conjunction of snow and the wolf-divided. this is—laughs helplessly—the seven amira zahra prophesies in ‘the time of division’…

The Sun will be divided that it might not sire children. Still its children shall be Four in number and its children shall be Seven in number and its children shall also be Numberless. The Numberless shall open the way for the Seven, and the Seven shall consume the Four...'

the four are the solar hours (sun-in-rags, meniscate, madrugad, flowermaker). the seven are sky, sea, serpent/wolf, wolf-divided, snow, rising spider, chandler. the various possible outcomes of the second dawn ALL depend on precisely in what configuration the seven coagulate into one again which is out of scope for the cliff notes but i’ve made charts about it.

teresa galmier is a name of the chandler btw that’s why she has rose aspect. good end chandler’s aspects will be winter / rose / moon / knock / lantern. bad end is winter / forge / lantern / knock / edge. low red sun chandler is… probably… grail instead of winter and nectar (blood) instead of edge but i’m still very iffy on how precisely those conjunctions are expressed. regardless,

if you’re interested in the wolf-divided play through the archaeologist librarian sometime. they broke into a tomb—quite possibly the mausoleum of wolves—and got themself haunted by a wolf-splinter. see also the barrowchild’s elegies, where the condition is described as ‘the avidity of trist,’ and note the description of trist: despairing and everything to do with dread in cultsim.

anyway. aside from the splinters these are the names of the wolf that we know of:

coelle the flower-girl (cinnabar memorial, drowned herself, "not the first and will not be the last")

ninegala / nyn / nina (cultsim, dream with health, dread: "In the land of the two rivers, in the days of Rimush and of Naram-Sin, there were stories told of a howling woman who devoured the children of other mothers. Last night there was a howling in my dreams." <- not the mother of ants, although she’s also the child of two rivers; mother of ants hales from ectbana, the historical references here indicate lagash. nyn wrote the scar in the sky, which is the wolf-word written once on each page, and came to regret it; nina lagasse’s paintings convinced julian coseley to change his mind regarding husher, who ascended under snow)

beidde.

eva dewulf.

in order to become a name, you emulate the enactments of an hour—because hours who share aspects often overlap so closely, enactments are the surest way to determine who is a name of whom.

take beidde. the foe believes he’s the colonel’s name. the colonel’s enactments are to be blind, to be scarred, to not be denied. here’s what we know about beidde:

Beidde’s Lesson

Biedde said: 'Blood can be replenished. Time cannot.' Biedde knew what he was about.

Beidde’s Blade

A cut from this blade will not cease bleeding until the wound is healed. One account has it that Biedde was a knife-collecting surgeon-highwayman in eighteenth-century Toulouse. Another claims Biedde is only the bastardisation of an Arabic word for 'mosquito'.

One account has it that Biedde is a bastardised Arabic word for 'mosquito'. But my Foe used to number Biedde among the Colonel's Names.

first, obvious problem is the colonel’s scarring versus beidde’s bleeding. mosquito. wounds that bleed without ceasing until they heal. a surgeon-highwayman. (again resisting the calyptra tangent but: the wolf is the white flower of calyptra and snow in particular is heavily, heavily associated with vampirism. it’s the intersection of sea’s grail + snow’s winter) – so beidde doesn’t have any clear connection to the colonel’s enactments.

but the wolf-divided is he unmaketh, he unmaketh, and at the last, he unmaketh. beidde was a "mosquito," a surgeon, and a highwayman—blood-letting others to sustain oneself, cutting into others to remove and remake what ails them, ending lives. three different kinds of unmaking. (also: surgeries & exsanguinations skill discusses the sanguine exception, which is "every door also opens the other way" and is one of calyptra’s key tenets.)

which brings us to eva dewulf.

here are the facts:

she was a skolekosophist and a herpetologist specifically; her book ‘eva’s treasury’ offers lessons in anbary & lapidary, ‘one hundred eight’ pentiments & precursors, and ‘ettery after’ (which she DID write) is a parable about calyptra generally and the crime of the sky specifically. (=rule of tincture is the allegory for the crime, there), so she knew inks of containment.

she taught her father valentine how to hatch stymphlings AND she—contra in-universe speculation about dealings with reckoners—likely had the requisite skill to draw year-tallies herself. rhyme & remembrance can hatch stymphlings, render essential periost, and draw year-tallies using periost, and it can be learnt from ‘lady eva’s repose.’ snow stories can also make all three, though there’s no obvious direct connection to eva.

her father valentine knew serpents & venoms techniques (<- implying this was the method eva taught him for hatching stymphlings; see ‘the republic of teeth’). he knew wolf stories (‘black nephrite’), which can render periost and produce a wormwood dream using a stymphling.

the remaining books about eva teach lessons in sea stories and pearl & tide. the technique for removing chionic theoplasma (…snow’s influence) from books is the “dewulf method” credited to gideon or eva, requires 7 heart, easiest with quenchings & quellings but possible with inks of containment.

the shadow in the stair tenebrous, the entity ernestine peterhans called the donkerling? name of the blackbone (it’s the thing that possessed lady nonna), and the blackbone is a) mentioned in relation to the moon and eva/snow in the crossing to noon, b) probably similar in relation to sea as the elegiast is to sky, cast-off bones picked clean of flesh, and c) with greater certainty, the "so below" conjunction of the velvet (black flower of calyptra)

meaning eva dewulf grew up with a very chatty name of something that used to be an emanation of the sea as, essentially, a family pet.

valentine visited fermier abbey—which i’m fairly certain is the monastery of the fifth cup, the library of the watchman’s tree patronized by the mare-in-the-tree, who is the name-emanation of the wheel from whom the line of antaios arose—anyway he went there and started having nightmares about the wheel and the second dawn. eventually he jumped, or fell, from the top of gullscry tower and washed up three days later. eva was the last to see him alive, and refused to say anything of their final conversation but that he’d begun to fear the sun.

four years later, her fiancée abraham wheelock fails to show up for the wedding. eva leaves london, he washes up three days later with his face eaten by birds and (forged) letters on his person implicating him as a spy. this has eyebrow-raising similarities to the account of eva’s history-twin, eva de braoise, in ‘us rocashaas.’ the painting of abraham and eva from a year prior is splashed with yewgall ink.

eva’s only (acknowledged) son, sebastian, is the captain of the hms kerisham, lost with all hands during the seven years war, likely the battle in quiberion bay in 1759. eva would have been 57-58 at the time; her illegitimate daughter (by franklin bancroft) would have been nine.

within a year of sebastian’s ship sinking, eva drowned herself and her twin infant granddaughters and was never seen again, but rumors abound.

TLA slaps the goddamned lightning-struck tower down after everett sends his earthquake. that lighthouse is of the serpent. exile fogfire point, another lighthouse, is haunted by the wolf-divided’s shadow. upcoming book of hours DLC house of light concerns ‘the lighthouse institute,’ which seems to interest the second dawn, and the tagline is “only twins drown twice.”

mausoleum of wolves describes the sound of the wolf’s howl on the wind as like the tearing of metal in a ship’s hull. as above/so below.

from coelle, we know there’s a connection between names of the wolf and drownings. yvette southey is the descendant of eva’s illegitimate child and her remarks in, like, all of her visits screams this connection quite loudly; most notable is the forgivable debt (reckoner war in kaunus, which is a place of power for the wolf—she speculates on how eva got her hands on extra years) and the particular mystique:

'Funniest thing. I keep getting speaking invitations from this odd little outfit: 'Church of the Ivory Dawn'. And, well, you'll laugh, Librarian…' 'They've made up their minds I'm their appointed leader. I've made up my mind I'm not, but they're pretty insistent. They've got a bee in their bonnet about my family folklore...' 'You know that immortals - Long - can't have children. Bad things happen if they try. What if a, hm, pre-immortal had children? Would there be anything special about those? Ivory Dawn likes to think so. I like to think not. And if I say anything more about that, I'll start to feel like a fool. Thanks, Librarian.'

…basically spells it out. (the chandler is very, very strongly associated with ivory. so is snow. by the way.)

everything we know about eva dewulf’s history is a precise description of how she did the wolf-divided’s enactments, influenced by her knowledge of sea and the serpent courtesy of the donkerling: he unmaketh (she kills her father and releases her brother from the cage valentine kept him in), he unmaketh (she kills her fiancée, utterly destroys his face and ruins his good name), and at the last, he unmaketh (her son’s ship is lost with all hands and she drowns herself and her grand-twins in the year her daughter—who does not carry the dewulf name—turns nine; note the rhyme here with the rite of the beast’s division, "the assistant's name is taken from them in a place, or on an occasion, of power; and they are divided into nine parts.")

…and her name literally means eve of the wolf. lol

(bancroft is still around too—he turns up during numa sometimes—so she and him circumvented the crime of the sky by, as yvette notes, having their child before either of them went long. but there are other ways)

the wolf has interesting associations with caer ys / kerisham—and with morgen and rowena, consequently, on this see sea stories and serpent root as well as their real-world mythological counterparts—obviously the sea-serpent devoured/drowned ys and if the city unbuilt is built in ys, it has a foundation-stone of amber (<- shared between the watchman, the sister-and-witch, and the serpent). and obv eva’s son’s ship was the hms kerisham, which is… not a safe thing to call a ship in this world and i hope the blackbone enjoyed her meal after the wolf-divided ripped the hull open, i guess. bfrhdjdjs

the secret is that the wolf-divided (and snow) are albedo—the white flower—separation, purification—and so unmaketh unmaketh unmaketh is about that moreso than annihilation; the wolf-divided hates because he is in agony but sating his hunger will bring him peace, and that’s the serpent (past) / the chandler (future). <- hence the serpent being the true forge of days. he’s, in a literal sense, the ragged crossroads. and the eclipse (<- often evoked not by name but by implied occlusion of the madrugad by the meniscate, as in purging witchworm contamination or purifications & exaltations. which is why you can use that skill, and only that skill, to make torgue’s cleansing with prentice sky. "The Corrivality manifests even in the operations of the Sun." <- the skill commits name the madrugad and the meniscate but the skill itself is a quote from george "kept a name of the chandler locked in a box in the basement until it smote him and everyone else in the gaol" collers.)

so the wolf (in all its manifestations) is an agent of cyclical change, death-rebirth-life, and the wolf-divided is an aspect who was violently sundered and seeks vengeance / release from torment, and snow is his dyad—not edge but i believe her aspects are winter/forge ('Fire', I once read, 'is the winter that warms and the spring that consumes.' - note the description for wolf-snow) and she’s the aspect who was altered by death but endures and waits without regret, although—as solomon husher says—she will not wait forever.

(snow as in winter snow. but also snow as in marine snow; hence, a union of sky and sea. she’s in juxtaposition with the blackbone in a similar way. hence, "'Here is your paint,' whispered the Wolf to the Pale Girl. 'Here is your knife-for-scraping. And here is your face.'" <- chione and the wolf. the elegiast doesn’t have a monopoly on winter-hours interested in painters.)

wrapping back to the rwby secret histories au: salem’s a name of the wolf-divided for the same reasons eva is, killed her father killed and was killed by her lover and they killed their children together. and the drownings. ozma follows a similar path as the elegiast (onetime name of the sky, shed his flesh) but ends up a name of snow rather than ascend to hourhood in his own right by virtue of being, to put it gently, a lackey of the calyptra.

can’t stop pondering the fascinating crime of the sky implications of edge dyad ozlem

#this has been a very abbreviated wolf rabbit hole. the wolf is not an alukite; the wolf is something that is not an alukite #to answer the edge dyad question i actually think in general #that edge-long are somewhat inoculated to the crime of the sky by their place in the corrivality #consumed by conflict with each other—the colonel is the lionsmith’s father at least in the metaphoric sense & the wolf-divided #is something that is not an alukite. they’d sublimate that hunger into fighting each other for the right to eat the child #forge-long + lantern-long pairs have it the worst bc they’re repeating the forge and the sun-in-splendour instead of just #not being cowards and eating each other a la sky and sea #anyway my notes on this game are a non euclidean shape.

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