#thanks to Clovis being a dickweed

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

It’s Week 3 and I promised I’d commit to my theory for Season of the Seraph’s story arc if hubris didn’t come knocking for me before then, so time to put my money where my digital mouth is. I’ve seen folks talking about the first part of this theory, but not the second, so here goes: 1) Clovis will try to make himself the new Warmind and 2) in the process breach the Ascendant Realm and open the way for Xivu Arath.

Clovis, by the way, gave away the game like two minutes in because he can’t keep his dang mouth shut. Clovis couldn’t resist a good smug gloat. He gave it all away when Ana said god, fine, hop on this disk and we’ll go. He said, “Once I am in control, all will be as it should be. The Warmind will rise again.” 

As it should be? That line stopped me cold. Clovis hated that Rasputin was in charge. He couldn’t believe he, the genius Clovis Bray the first, was expected to take orders from a jumped-up calculator he used to own. A restored Rasputin is not “as it should be” in Clovis-land. What is “as it should be?” It’s Clovis, so that’s easy: the way things should be is with him in charge. He doesn’t say, “Rasputin will rise again.” He says, “The Warmind will rise again.” Clovis is going to get all the subminds together except put himself at the center instead of the Rasputin core Ana has, and try to make himself the new Warmind. All of which would just be fun to watch as we wait for Red to break him, but: there’s Xivu Arath to deal with. 

We’re all worried about Xivu getting into the warsats. I don’t think she wants them at all. In the Judgement of Kelgorath lore she doesn’t order Kelgorath to go get her some warsats. She says: possess the Warmind. Xivu Arath has plenty of weapons already. What she needs, as Mara points out, is a way in. Mara comments in the encounter dialogue that moving an army through the ascendant realm is very hard. But Xivu did it over Torobatl. How? Sav showed her the way: she did it by getting someone on the other side to build her a gate.

I was surprised in Season of the Hunt by the extent of control Xivu displayed. I thought her unlikely to go for subversive powers like Oryx’s Taking or Sav’s manipulation. But she’s a lot smarter than I gave her credit for. Her Wrathborn contagion is effective, coercive, and quick-spreading. It makes sense metaphorically: violence is a kind of disease, an insidious way of thinking that spreads and snares people till they see everything as a conflict to be settled by force. Xivu invaded the Cabal by infecting Caiatl’s co-ruler Umun’arath, general of the Cabal legions. Driven further and further into obsession with the conflict Xivu Arath makes herself synonymous with, Umun’arath invoked her in the rituals of warfare - the same ones Eris and Eido were discussing - opening the way for Xivu’s armies to pour into the skies over Torobatl. 

For Xivu to repeat that trick in our solar system, she needs another Umun’arath. But Umun’arath was a singularly convenient target: the military chief of the war machine of a huge conquering interstellar empire, or in other words, someone you might call...war-minded. When scouting our solar system Xivu probably heard the name “Warmind” and thought hell yeah, that’s my ticket in. Except it’s not, because Rasputin’s a) not coherent right now and b) not fundamentally the personality she needs. That’s what we’re already exploring this season: at his core Rasputin was never a martial system. He was a pretentious art nerd who got drafted. They made him a Warmind. Xivu Arath needs someone coterminous with war for its own sake, with conflict as the apex of existence, with the supreme violence she represents. And ironically it turns out the Warmind Rasputin is not sufficiently war-minded. 

But Clovis is.

Clovis Bray already sees life as endless contest and conflict via his pseudo-evolutionary legacy bullshit. He’s Xivu’s dream target. When you first see her forces attacking him Clovis is like “they want my precious braaaaaain!” and Osiris goes, “no, they want him. Brought to submit.” That’s exactly what Clovis wants of Rasputin (and to a lesser extent Ana and Elsie): brought to submit. He’s neck deep in Darkness on his own, no convincing needed. And he’s a coward. If Clovis hasn’t cut a deal yet with either Xivu or the Witness to ensure “humanity’s” (his) survival in exchange for his allegiance, he will as soon as he has the reins. After all, let it not be said that he left humanity to fend for itself, right?

So that’s her plan: Xivu Arath attacks the warsat infrastructure to force us to go to Clovis and give him access to Red’s enclave. She waits while we do all the hard work of laying out the subminds to conjure back Rasputin. Clovis inevitably betrays us to slot himself in instead and take control, rousing Rasputin’s entire apparatus of violence to impose his own command on the solar system, helped along by the Wrathborn contagion already brewing in his subconscious. In doing so he invokes such immense rites of war that he opens the way for Xivu to step through. It’s Torobatl all over again...except I don’t think trying to “become the Warmind” is going to work out the way Clovis thinks. 

Clovis still doesn’t understand what Rasputin is, and he still doesn’t understand - as he doesn’t understand with any of his kids - that Rasputin is no longer as Clovis designed him to be. Even Ana hasn’t fully gotten there yet. Both Brays are still thinking of Red as a sort of jigsaw puzzle to be pieced back together. But assembling himself was the first thing Rasputin ever did. Ana still hasn’t cracked the real reason “plug engram into Exo, receive Warmind” isn’t working: because Rasputin is a distributed intelligence. He lives in connections, literally and metaphorically - between warsats, between worlds, with Ana, with humanity. He’s a creature fundamentally built on network and communication. Rasputin is already still out there. He’s in that engram, but he’s everywhere else, too. He’s still in the warsats. He’s talking to us through the Sleeper nodes. He’s going to fight Clovis for control of that Exo Frame; that’s why the frame has red eye-lights in all the season art even though Clovis uses blue ones. 

And in the larger paracausal sense our entire solar system still bears the marks of the Warmind’s influence. He’s synonymous with the Golden Age. The same way Oryx conjured back Savathun and Xivu Arath by recreating the shapes they made, Rasputin will be conjured back by the shape he traced out in a huge web of connections and actions and effects on others that Clovis, an isolated point, fundamentally doesn’t understand. So Clovis is going to pull his little coup, possibly smashing that engram along the way, and he’s going to think it’s working, too - right before Rasputin cracks him open like an egg, because the Warmind never left. I think this season ends with us fighting Clovis in full Wrathborn mode while Xivu Arath’s armies stand ready just on the other side in the Ascendant Realm, hammering to get in, and Rasputin will deliver the final blow from inside - or maybe not, since killing Umun’arath completed the ritual last time, maybe we just wedge Clovis into his own Pillory engram - stopping Xivu from getting her beachhead and leaving her angry but stranded in the Ascendant Realm. 

Hopefully. Either way I can’t wait to see what happens.