Hi everyone, I cant help but wonder if there are more people around who have played the game of Tak. What are you're thoughts on the game. Do you think you can win in many different ways?

I just occasionaly have played it, and would love to play it more. If there are any enthousiasts in/around the region of the Hague. I would love to have a worthy opponent!

Okay, this has turned into a MUCH bigger rabbit hole than I intended, so apologies in advance. This probably means absolutely nothing, but I’ve spent far too long on it now 😂

It started with someone pointing out that Cinder’s sword is repeatedly described using language of cold, winter and quiet.

And that got me thinking.

What if the Chandrian’s signs aren’t passive things that just happen everywhere they go?

What if the signs are produced when they use their swords?

Bear with me…

We know the Chandrian can hide their signs somehow. The Cthaeh tells Kvothe they have a lot of experience hiding those telltale signs.

Cinder manages to spend time as the bandit leader in the Eld without everyone around him freezing to death or realising they’re apparently working for one of the Chandrian.

But when Kvothe meets Cinder at the troupe massacre, his sword is out.

And that sword is weird.

It’s pale and elegant, and Kvothe describes it in terms of winter ice. Even the sound of it is compared to the quiet of the coldest winter days.

Cinder/Ferule’s sign?

“Ferule chill and dark of eye.”

Then we see Cinder again in the Eld.

No obvious supernatural cold.

And, importantly, we don’t see him use that sword.
That made me wonder whether Cinder isn’t actually suppressing his sign at all.

Maybe the sign simply isn’t active because the sword isn’t.

Seven swords?

So I started looking at Shehyn’s list again:

Cyphus bears the blue flame.
Stercus is in thrall of iron.
Ferule chill and dark of eye.
Usnea lives in nothing but decay.
Grey Dalcenti never speaks.
Pale Alenta brings the blight.
Last there is the lord of seven:
Hated. Hopeless. Sleepless. Sane.
Alaxel bears the shadow’s hame.

I’ve always assumed these were basically curses attached to seven people.

But what if they’re descriptions of what their swords do?
And if these swords are ancient — potentially Creation War ancient — maybe they weren’t forged in anything like the normal sense.

Maybe they were Shaped.

Not necessarily swords literally made from lumps of glass, blood, water etc.

I’m thinking more along the lines of a Shaper taking the underlying properties of two things and combining them into something new.

So I started working backwards from each sign. And this is where things got slightly ridiculous.

Cyphus’s sword — Shaped from FIRE + STONE

“Cyphus bears the blue flame.”

The obvious starting point is fire.

But why blue fire?

Copper compounds can produce blue/blue-green flame.
And copper comes from stone/ore.

So perhaps stone is the underlying principle, while copper is the particular physical expression of it.

Fire + copper-bearing stone gives us the blue flame.

Which wouldn’t be terribly exciting on its own…

Except there’s a Taborlin story involving Scyphus.

Scyphus captures Taborlin and takes his staff and sword. When Taborlin gets his things back, Marten specifically describes the sword as:

his copper sword, Skyaldrin

Dedan even interrupts him to argue that Taborlin’s sword wasn’t copper.

So Rothfuss has deliberately put:

Scyphus + a copper sword into the same story.

And Shehyn gives us: Cyphus + blue flame.

I’m NOT saying Skyaldrin secretly belongs to Cyphus. The story explicitly calls it Taborlin’s.

But these stories have been passed down for thousands of years. Maybe the Taborlin story has preserved a fragment of something much older.

There are also old stories of ever-burning lamps.

Maybe somewhere underneath all these different stories is the memory of an ancient weapon that burns with blue flame.

Stercus’s sword — Shaped from STONE + BLOOD

“Stercus is in thrall of iron.”

Everyone seems to jump from iron to rust.

But rust isn’t really an iron power.

Rust is decay.

And we already have:

“Usnea lives in nothing but decay.”

So I don’t think Stercus is the one rusting everything.

I think thrall is the important word.

What do we know in these books that attracts iron? A loden-stone.

Kvothe spends enough time learning about them that we’re very clearly told what they do: they pull on iron.
So perhaps Stercus’s sword has been Shaped with the property of a loden-stone.

But thrall doesn’t just mean attraction.

It means being under someone’s power. Enslaved. Enthralled.

And then I started thinking about blood.

Blood contains iron.

No, I’m not suggesting you could stick someone to a fridge magnet because there’s iron in their haemoglobin 😂

I’m thinking in terms of the magic of this world. Blood is repeatedly treated as an incredibly powerful link to a person.

So perhaps: loden-stone → iron → blood → attraction → enthrallment.

The physical effect is attraction of iron.

The living effect is attraction/control of people.

Which could potentially explain some of the old stories about madness and strange behaviour around the Chandrian.

And then I realised Aleph describes the angels as having:
wings of stone and blood

Exactly the pairing I’d just arrived at.

Which was mildly irritating 😂

Ferule/Cinder’s sword — Shaped from GLASS + WATER

This is the one we actually get to SEE.

Cinder’s sword doesn’t read like an ordinary metal sword at all.

Everything about it is pale, cold, smooth, wintery and almost ice-like. Even the sound it makes is described through the strange quiet of a bitterly cold winter day.

So:

GLASS + WATER = ICE

Not necessarily literally a glass sword with water sloshing around inside it 😂

I’m thinking Shaping — taking two underlying principles and bringing them together to create something new.
The sword isn’t necessarily made from ordinary glass and water. It has been Shaped from the properties of both.

Glass gives us something pale, hard, smooth and crystalline.

Water gives us ice/cold.
Result: Ferule chill and dark of eye.

And again, this is the one sword we actually see.

At the troupe massacre:

sword out → cold/quiet imagery everywhere.

In the Eld:

no strange sword → no obvious supernatural cold.

That’s what started this whole stupid rabbit hole.

Usnea’s sword — Shaped from WATER + AIR

“Usnea lives in nothing but decay.”

Initially I was trying to involve time here, but that felt far too vague.

What actually causes things to decay naturally?

Water + air.

Moisture and oxygen.

Iron corrodes.

Wood rots.

Stone and brick weather and crumble.

Which is interesting because the old Chandrian stories seem confused about whether these are different signs:
rusted metal, rotting wood, crumbling masonry.

Maybe they’re all manifestations of decay.

That would also mean:

“When your bright sword turns to rust…”doesn’t necessarily describe Stercus just because Stercus mentions iron.

It could be the result of Usnea’s sword acting on somebody else’s weapon.

Grey Dalcenti’s sword — Shaped from AIR + GLASS

“Grey Dalcenti never speaks.”

Initially I couldn’t make this one work at all.

Then I thought about what silence actually requires.
Sound travels through air.

Remove the air and sound cannot travel.

Mirror-glass can create a sealed boundary.

So perhaps Dalcenti’s sword has been Shaped to create some sort of absence or control of air around it.

AIR + GLASS → SILENCE

And there is actually a Creation War clue for the air part.
When Lanre binds Selitos he commands the air and lays it “leaden” on Selitos’ tongue.

He uses air to prevent Selitos speaking.

That seems rather relevant to: Grey Dalcenti never speaks.

Maybe Dalcenti isn’t simply a bloke who doesn’t talk.

Maybe silence is the sign.

Pale Alenta’s sword — Shaped from BLOOD + SHADOW

This is probably the weakest one at the moment, so feel free to tear it apart.

“Pale Alenta brings the blight.”

Blight affects living things. People, animals, crops.

So blood seems like the obvious underlying principle for life.

Then shadow.

Living things deprived of light wither and die. Plants especially.

Extend that through Shaping to blood/life and perhaps you get sickness, infertility, crop failure, blight.

I’m not married to this one.

Alaxel/Haliax’s sword — Shaped from SHADOW + FIRE

“Alaxel bears the shadow’s hame.”

Shadow is obviously the easy half.

Fire is repeatedly associated with Lanre/Haliax — Myr Tariniel is burned, and we repeatedly encounter Haliax surrounded by fire and destruction while remaining impossibly cloaked in shadow.

But the main reason I kept this combination is Aleph again.

The angels are described as having: wings of fire and shadow

Again, that’s an exact pair Rothfuss has already put together.

And then I noticed the bloody pattern…

I hadn’t started with seven materials and tried to assign them.

I’d been trying to work backwards from the signs.

But when I wrote them all down:

Cyphus’s sword = FIRE + STONE
Stercus’s sword = STONE + BLOOD
Alenta’s sword = BLOOD + SHADOW
Alaxel’s sword = SHADOW + FIRE

They form a closed loop:

FIRE → STONE → BLOOD → SHADOW → FIRE

Then:

Ferule’s sword = GLASS + WATER
Usnea’s sword = WATER + AIR
Dalcenti’s sword = AIR + GLASS

Another closed loop:

GLASS → WATER → AIR → GLASS

And every single root appears exactly twice.

Fire twice.
Stone twice.
Blood twice.
Shadow twice.
Glass twice.
Water twice.
Air twice.

That’s the point where I stopped thinking I was just assigning random things to them 😂

Especially because Aleph already gives us:
fire + shadow and stone + blood as exact pairs.

His other pairing is iron + glass, which I haven’t quite worked out yet.

But clearly these sorts of pairings existed around the time of the Creation War.

And if these swords were Shaped during that period, that suddenly seems quite important.

But why swords?

Cinder is the obvious reason.

We physically see his sword, and Rothfuss spends an unusual amount of time describing it.

But there’s another enormous section of WMF devoted to something that always felt slightly… excessive.

The Adem sword room. We get ancient swords. Names. Histories. Owners going back thousands of years.

Kvothe is given Caesura, but the Adem don’t really treat the relationship as:

Kvothe owns this sword.

The sword existed before Kvothe.

It has its own name, history, and line of bearers.

Kvothe is just the latest person attached to it.

And that reminded me horribly of the Yllish knots.

When Kvothe is learning Yllish, he struggles with the fact that possession can work both ways.

It isn’t simply: the Chancellor’s socks.

The grammar can imply something much stranger — almost as though: the socks own the Chancellor.

The relationship goes both directions.

Now look at Shehyn’s wording again.

“Cyphus bears the blue flame.”
“Alaxel bears the shadow’s hame.”

Maybe the distinction matters. Maybe the Chandrian don’t simply own these swords. Maybe they bear them.

The sword belongs to the Chandrian. But in another sense…the Chandrian belongs to the sword.

The person is temporary. The weapon persists.

Exactly like the Adem swords and their long lists of bearers.

Which raises another horrible possibility I’m not going down yet 😂

Maybe names like Ferule aren’t simply the names of the people.

Maybe they belong to the weapon/role as much as the person carrying it.

And then there’s Taborlin

Taborlin has his own collection of ancient magical tools:
sword
staff
cloak
candle
amulet
coin
key.

And some of these seem to echo the Seven strangely.

Haliax literally bears a shadow’s hame — a covering/cloak.

Cyphus bears blue flame — candle/fire.

Stercus and the loden-stone/amulet idea potentially overlap.

Dalcenti and the staff may connect if the staff is a means of controlling or commanding power.

But the one that really bothers me is the sword.
In Marten’s story, Scyphus captures Taborlin and takes his staff and sword.

When Taborlin gets it back, Marten specifically calls it:
his copper sword, Skyaldrin

Dedan actually interrupts to dispute the fact that Taborlin’s sword was copper.

Again, the sword belongs to Taborlin in the story. I’m not trying to quietly give it to Scyphus.

But we’ve now got an ancient story that deliberately places:

Scyphus + copper sword together.
And Shehyn gives us: Cyphus + blue flame.

Copper compounds can produce blue/blue-green flame.

Which is an awfully strange detail to preserve in that particular story.

Maybe Taborlin’s seven magical tools preserve distorted memories of these ancient weapons.

Maybe they’re completely separate.

Or maybe Taborlin’s tools were actually designed to counter the Seven swords.

I haven’t worked that bit out yet.

And finally… the Watchers

This is probably my favourite part.

At Kvothe’s troupe massacre, the Chandrian are sitting around with their signs everywhere.

Cinder’s strange sword is out. Then suddenly Haliax notices something. They look upward. They come.

And they disappear.

But when we see Cinder in the Eld, he’s successfully hiding.

No obvious supernatural cold. No strange sword being used. Then Marten starts praying.

He calls Tehlu, Ordal and Andan.

Cinder suddenly looks towards the sky. Then legs it.

We know the angels/Watchers can apparently be called properly.

So what if there’s another way of calling them?

Using the swords. Sword is activated. The two principles it was Shaped from manifest. The Chandrian sign appears.

And that sign acts like a beacon.

The Watchers can find them.

That would explain why the Chandrian have spent thousands of years learning how to hide their signs.
Maybe “hiding the signs” isn’t actually suppressing a curse that’s permanently leaking out of them.

Maybe most of the time they simply don’t draw/use the swords that create the signs.

At the troupe massacre they do. The Watchers come.
In the Eld Cinder doesn’t. Marten calls the Watchers anyway. Cinder runs.

What about the Mauthen farm?

This was the first thing I tried to use to destroy the theory.

There are signs everywhere after the Chandrian have left. Rotten wood. Rusted metal. Blue flame. But that doesn’t necessarily break it.

If Usnea’s sword causes accelerated decay and then she puts it away, the wood doesn’t magically become new again.

If iron rusts, it stays rusted.

If Cyphus’s weapon burns something, it stays burned. The active sign stops.

The physical damage remains.

And we never actually witness the end of the Mauthen massacre.

We don’t know why the Chandrian left. We don’t know whether something came.

So…

Maybe I’ve completely lost the plot 😂

But I can’t quite get rid of this now.

Cinder’s sword seems to physically resemble his sign.

Cinder displays the sign when we see the sword out and apparently doesn’t when he’s hiding in the Eld.

The Seven can somehow hide their signs.

The Adem spend an enormous amount of the second book teaching Kvothe — and us — that ancient swords have names, histories and bearers.

Yllish grammar explicitly screws around with which side of an ownership relationship actually possesses the other.
Shehyn describes the Chandrian as bearing things.

The seven signs can be modelled as swords Shaped from pairs of underlying principles.

Those pairs unexpectedly form two closed loops in which every root occurs exactly twice.

Two of those exact pairs — stone/blood and fire/shadow — already appear in Aleph’s description of the angels.
Taborlin has seven ancient magical tools, including a copper sword in the story of Scyphus.

And whenever the Chandrian seem to realise the Watchers are coming, they look to the sky and disappear.

So my current ridiculous theory is:

The Chandrian signs aren’t passive curses.

They are the effects produced by seven ancient Shaped swords, each formed from two fundamental principles.
The Chandrian don’t simply own those swords. They bear them — and perhaps, in the Yllish sense, the ownership goes both ways.

Drawing/using the swords manifests the signs.

And manifesting those signs may be what allows the Watchers to find them.

Which might explain why the Chandrian are so bloody careful about hiding them.

Anyway.

I’ve been down this rabbit hole for far too long now.

Please destroy it before I find another one 😂 I will maybe put a summary in the comments again

At the end of Wise Man's Fear. Kvothe finally tells Denna he wants her to love him. Denna quickly dismisses him, citing that he's recently been dating a large number of women and sleeping around, telling Kvothe she "won't be one of the many."

Now, we as readers know that Denna is a paid companion to men. He heard Denna tell the younger girl in Severen that they have to expect to be 'ridden' every now and again. I mean for goodness' sake, Kvothe saw her on a 'date' with Ambrose. He's willing to look past all of this. But Denna won't do the same for him.

What do you think is going on here? Is she finding any reason not to be with him romantically because she has her own hidden agenda/mission and if she started this kind of relationship with him it would ruin her true plans?

Is she being sincere but self-centered and not aware of how much of a hypocrite's she being? Does she believe Kvothe is ignorant to what she does for a living and that she can get away with using this justification? Is she actually hurt by Kvothe's actions?

Why do you think she responded that way given her own background?

Two of things that get thrown out about Kvothe is he is a mary sue, and an unreliable narrator. Both are not true because the subtext of the stories is hinting at you the whole time that they are not. Kvothe KNOWS his weakness now, as Kote the inn keeper, and if you know it too, you realize he is not unreliable in the sense what he says is wrong or he made it up. Everything he says is correct, as he saw it at the time.

It’s like you telling a story about yourself, before realizing your own ignorance and blind spots, and then the former story becoming ironic when you reveal a misconception or many you previously had. That’s the set up, you are meant to read the third book (or you were meant to read it) and cringe at how Kvothe acted in the first two, how he was mistaken, because he thought he was wiser than he was. If he is just lying all the time in the first two, nothing means anything and everything can mean anything, in the dark all the cats are grey

Secondly, neither Kvothe nor Kote are mary-sues and the previous point supports this one, Kvothe has a fatal flaw like greek hero’s, he actually has a couple. He is impatient, he readily disregards rules, and he ASSUMES too much. There is nothing more wrong than an intelligent person who is wrong, because they can use their intellect to twist every variable to fit their ends. That’s Kvothe. His worst flaw is his impatience.

If Kvothe was a mary sue we would be reading something more like Eragon

It’s crazy to me that the masters ask candidate students for a reference from an archanist and then assign them to basic principles of sympathy without testing whether the candidate knows sympathy. If they just asked Kvothe to do a double binding all of that nonsense could have been skipped.

No point to this post I guess.

Another long one I’m sorry guys - summary in comments below 🤣

Following on from my old theory about Kvothe’s silence, I think I might have been looking at it slightly backwards.

I’ve always thought the third silence was more than Kote simply being quiet. It belongs to him and seems to spread through the Waystone, settling into the walls, Folly, the candlelight, his unfinished memoir and even his hands.

What if the silence isn’t something suppressing Kvothe because he’s broken? What if Kvothe is producing it?
We already have a Chandrian whose sign seems rather relevant: Grey Dalcenti never speaks.

I’ve wondered before whether Kvothe somehow becomes the new Grey Dalcenti, or at least takes on whatever role or sign Dalcenti had. I don’t necessarily mean he literally joins Haliax and becomes one of the Seven. Perhaps Rhinta describes something a person can become, and Kvothe has become something similar.

Which brings me back to Denna.

I’ve never particularly liked Master Ash = Cinder. One of my alternative suspects has always been Grey Dalcenti, with Bredon as my candidate for Master Ash.
So what if Bredon = Master Ash = Grey Dalcenti, and Kvothe eventually kills him?

There could be a horrible misunderstanding behind it.
Denna is at Trebon, surrounded by denner resin, then disappears. From memory, her very white teeth start being mentioned afterwards. I need to check whether they were described that way beforehand, but Rothfuss specifically teaches us that unnaturally white teeth are a sign of sweet-eaters.

What if Denna develops a dependency on denner resin after Trebon, and Bredon is actually helping her?
Imagine Kvothe discovering that the mysterious patron who has been “beating” Denna is also supplying her with denner resin. Kvothe already despises this man. He isn’t likely to stop and wonder whether Bredon might actually be rationing the resin and trying to wean her off it.

I’m increasingly suspicious of the “beating” too. Denna wants to learn how to fight, while Bredon carries a cane and teaches through games and strategy. Perhaps at least some of her injuries come from training she has willingly agreed to. He might even quite literally be beating her at Tak.

I’m not trying to explain away what Denna says about her patron hurting her; those passages need checking properly. I just think there is plenty of room for Kvothe to discover several genuine pieces of evidence and assemble them into completely the wrong story.

Especially if he also discovers that Bredon isn’t merely Master Ash, but Grey Dalcenti.

As far as Kvothe is concerned, he has suddenly found both the man he believes is abusing Denna and one of the Seven responsible for murdering his family.

We know how well Kvothe handles situations like that.
So I think Kvothe kills Grey Dalcenti believing he is saving Denna and avenging his family, only to discover afterwards that he misunderstood at least some of what was happening. Denna knew her patron better than Kvothe did. Perhaps she knew exactly what he was and trusted him anyway. Perhaps he genuinely was helping her.

That would give Denna a very good reason to finally walk away from Kvothe. He has done exactly what she repeatedly asked him not to do: interfered in her life because he thought he knew better than she did.
But perhaps you cannot simply kill one of the Rhinta and walk away.

Maybe Kvothe Names Dalcenti, changes him, breaks whatever binds him, takes his place, or somehow inherits part of what he was. I don’t know what the mechanism would be yet, so I’m leaving that bit alone.

What matters is that Grey Dalcenti’s sign is silence.
And in the frame, the silence now belongs to Kvothe.
Which makes the strange mercenary rather interesting. Whatever is inside him eventually focuses directly on Kvothe and asks:

“Te Rhintae?”

Maybe it can recognise something everyone else cannot.
This is where I think we may also have been making the wrong assumption about Kote’s missing magic.

What if Kvothe hasn’t lost it?

What if magic simply doesn’t work properly inside the Waystone?

Kvothe built the inn himself, and its name is suspicious enough before we even get into its construction. We already know that physical materials can interfere with the Fae; Felurian specifically mentions iron, fire and mirror-glass as protections against darker Fae.

The Waystone is repeatedly described through stone, wood, metal, glass, fire, locks and doors, with Kvothe’s silence running through all of it.

Maybe Kvothe deliberately built somewhere magically quiet: a place where Naming, Sympathy, Fae magic, perhaps even Names themselves, are dampened or silenced.

Basically, Kvothe’s magical peace palace.

That gives his apparent failure during the mercenary attack a completely different meaning. Kvothe uses the elderberry liquor, mutters under his breath and concentrates on the mercenary.

Nothing happens.

We assume Kvothe tried Sympathy and discovered that he can no longer perform it.

But perhaps Sympathy cannot work there.

Bast might give us another clue. He remains Fae inside the Waystone, and iron still affects him, so the building hasn’t changed what he is. Yet when a supernatural creature starts murdering people in the bar, Bast fights it entirely physically. He tackles it, smashes it into the bar and claws at it rather than apparently using any Fae magic.

Outside the Waystone, Bast is quite capable of magical workings.

Perhaps the Waystone doesn’t change what you are. It limits what you can do.

Even the mercenary’s strange behaviour could fit. He enters apparently searching for something, struggles to speak and repeatedly loses focus. Eventually his eyes settle on Kvothe, sharpen, and he asks whether Kvothe is Rhintae.

Maybe whatever is inside the mercenary isn’t simply malfunctioning. Perhaps the Waystone is interfering with it too.

And I don’t think any of this means the Waystone is failing.
I think Bast is deliberately undermining what Kvothe is trying to achieve.

Kvothe has spent years becoming Kote. He has disappeared, stopped playing music, stopped telling his stories and apparently done everything possible to remove Kvothe from the world.

Bast wants his Reshi back.

So he does the opposite. He encourages stories about Kvothe, engineers situations intended to make Kote behave like him again, and ultimately helps bring Chronicler into the Waystone so Kvothe will tell his story.
Kvothe has spent years making himself disappear while Bast is effectively sending his name back out into the world.

Perhaps the supernatural things appearing around Newarre aren’t evidence that Kvothe’s hiding place is failing. Perhaps something has simply started looking for him again, and Bast is unknowingly leaving breadcrumbs.
That changes the way I see Kote too.

Maybe he isn’t a broken hero who has given up and needs Bast to bring Kvothe back.

Maybe Kote is deliberate.

Perhaps Kvothe knows exactly what he has become and exactly what happens if he starts being Kvothe again.
He spends his life hunting the Chandrian, finally finds Grey Dalcenti through Denna, kills him and somehow becomes something Rhinta-like himself. His sign becomes silence, so Kvothe builds the Waystone to contain himself and his magic, becomes Kote and waits quietly to die.

For probably the first time in his life, Kvothe might actually be doing the sensible thing.

Unfortunately, Bast loves him enough to completely bugger it up. 😂

What’s the general consensus now? I still think it’ll never be finished

Everyone here says Denna and Kvothes storys mirror eachother, I've seen so many people say it as if it's fact. Is this something Patrick said himself at some writing or convention? If not I don't see it at all, it's a little confusing as we know little about her early life, but I can't see how they mirror eachother at all

One thing I’ve wondered about is why it’s Chronicler who goes looking for Kvothe’s story and not Skarpi himself. At the start of NotW, Kvothe makes a reference (“Rumourmongers, both of you”) that indicates they know each other, and Pat said the original start of the NotW was a chapter with Skarpi and Chronicler talking.

I’ve been wondering: why wouldn’t Skarpi chase down a story as interesting as Kvothe’s? Why would he let Chronicler get that scoop?

My theory: Denna is alive (but miserable, thinking Kvothe’s dead and she’s the reason for it) in the present day narrative. At the same time Chronicler is interviewing Kvothe, Skarpi is interviewing Denna somewhere in the world.

Would be cool to get another trilogy but from Denna’s perspective.

Hes Heliax. Idk if this has been said before but what a twist that'd be!

Arguments:

1. How would an omniscient being get trapped in a tree? Did it get omniscient afterwards? Did it get trapped by beings stronger than it (cinder did it a "bad turn once")? Did it willingly submit to being a tree for other benefits - long life?

2. Bast says the Cthaeh is omniscient, and part of many fae fables - but a major theme in the kkc story is that stories get twisted over time. See Kvothes reputation.

3. Omniscience doesn't fit within the magical systems of the world. It's more likely seeing, as part of advanced shaping and naming, that allows the Cthaeh to see the inside of people and either hurt/help them by mentioning things from their past, and interpolating to the future. Kvothe meeting cinder twice... Is Cthaeh realizing before Kvothe that the man from the bandit camp is cinder. ​And maybe the writing is on the wall for a third meeting.

4. ​Maybe becoming a being like the Cthaeh is advanced alchemy. Say someone like selitos took out an eye, and imbued an object with long life ( a tree?) with those seeing properties. Then he does it again, with all parts of himself.... = Cthaeh?

Is there any reason that the Baron Jakis can't be Dennas patron?

... introduce a morally-gray and massive character-building moment for Kvothe by having him need to kill off a real Edema Ruh troupe-turned-bad instead of a fake one. I say this with caution, as there are obvious parallels between the Ruh and real-life Romani caravans that must be acknowledged.

Throughout both books, Kvothe is constantly espousing his love for the Ruh and how they're the best performers in all regards, across all lands. His perspective is obviously colored by his charmed upbringing and subsequent loss of his family. In TWMF he goes on this way to a point that's almost obnoxious. Near the end of the book, Kvothe briefly falls in with a troupe of Ruh only to discover that they are merely bandits posing as a Ruh troupe, pilfering, kidnapping, and raping their way through the world before Kvothe puts a stop to it by slaughtering them. The arc is capped with our protagonist boldly defending the Ruh people in front of the Maer and the Lady Lackless, who has a distinct hatred of the Edema.

I think it would have been much more interesting if this troupe was genuinely Edema Ruh - which would have put Kvothe in the challenging position of being obligated to cull the bad apples from the bunch despite them being the first of his family he's come across in many years. Furthermore, it would have made the scene with the Maer and Lackless that much more interesting - fighting against prejudiced beliefs while battling the fallout from a morally-gray circumstance. If anything, I do think this would have been some great character development for Kvothe beyond learning swords/magic/sex at a faster pace than any mortal man alive.

What do y'all think?

What would've happened if Kvothe didn't bring his Edema Ruh bloodline up and didn't insult Meluna's ideology and Maer's view on Edema Ruhs?

It's almost certain that kvothe would be able to find a patron, continue to enjoy the wealth that is provided by Maer to him, gain some information regarding the Amyr... Then what? It definitely would've been a whole another journey and I don't mean that Kvothe shouldn't have defended Edema Ruhs against Maer and Meluan but I was just wondering about how the progress of the story advance.

Tell me your ideas!

The journey was great, and I probably won't mind the absence of the third book unless I re-read the entire series at least 5 times and connect all the dots as best as I can.

​But ever since I read the part where Bast warns Kvothe because he mentioned the Chandrian's names, and the parts where Kvothe no longer shows any trace of his past abilities, something has been nagging me.

​It's clear that whatever happened in the rest of young Kvothe's life, Kvothe wasn't able to defeat the Chandrian. They are still out there and he has seemingly lost all hope in the present timeline. So even if we got a very well-written third book, would it satisfy us knowing that the Chandrian still exist at the end of it?

​Yes, it would be awesome if we got the third book, but Kvothe would still be a depressed bartender at the end of the day. A significantly large portion of the community would want Kvothe to get his life together, find a way to return to his prime, and take his revenge. But that would require a fourth book, which seems unlikely even in a scenario where the third book had been released.

​Would you guys be content with a third book knowing that Kvothe ultimately failed his life mission of killing the Chandrian, and that he will just rot in his inn until his death?

​I've been asking myself this and wanted to hear your thoughts!

I am starting a reread of the series, and I’m curious if anyone has any good theories on what’s going to happen in the third book, if we ever get it.

I think the first half of Doors of Stone will basically catch us up to the present-day Kote timeline.

Kvothe is way too stubborn and driven for me to believe he simply chose to give up. I think his feud with Ambrose Jakis will eventually escalate into something serious enough that Kvothe is forced to leave the University/Arcanum in disgrace.

I also think he’ll eventually return to Tarbean, possibly in disguise. Which is why Skarpi, will be able to help the chronicler find him.

Most importantly, I don’t think the story ends with Kvothe becoming Kote.

I think the first half catches us up to the present, and then the story continues forward. Kvothe becomes an adventurer again and finally pursues the goal that started everything: finding and confronting the Chandrian who killed his troupe, and hopefully delivering some sort of karmic justice to Ambrose along the way.

Long ramble incoming, this started off with me wondering where the moon actually is when Kvothe is in the Fae, and has somehow ended up with the Mauthen vase being a map to the Doors of Stone and Iax…

So bear with me.

Something has always bothered me about the moon in the Fae.

When Kvothe follows Felurian into the Fae, the moon is full in the mortal world. Felurian has crossed into the mortal world under the full moon, Kvothe follows her back into the Fae, and there is no moon in the Fae sky.

Felurian lives in the twilight, and later, while Kvothe is there, the moon eventually appears.

“foolish sweet, there is only one moon. we have been waiting on her. she will help us enbighten your shaed.”

So they have actually been waiting for the moon to arrive in the Fae.

We know from Felurian that there is only one moon, and it moves between the two worlds,

“so now she moves ’twixt mortal and the fae.”

When the moon is full in the mortal world, the Fae feel its pull towards the mortal, which is how Kvothe encounters Felurian in the first place. When there is no moon in the mortal sky, the moon is in the Fae and the pull goes the other way.

But I think I’ve been looking at this wrong.

What if the moon doesn’t just move between the mortal world and the Fae?

What if it physically travels through the Fae?

The Fae doesn’t work like the mortal world. Day and night seem to be geographical there. Kvothe can literally walk Dayward and the sky gets progressively brighter until he is standing in full daylight. He can travel in the opposite direction, Darkward, and the world gets progressively darker.

Felurian lives somewhere between the two, in the twilight.

So what if the moon moves through those geographical regions too?

When the moon is full in the mortal world, the moon isn’t visible in the Fae at all.

Then as the mortal moon begins to wane, the moon starts entering the Fae.

Kvothe actually seems to witness this. He enters the Fae under a full mortal moon and there is no moon there, but later the moon arrives while he is with Felurian in the twilight. She has literally been “waiting on her.”

So maybe as the moon disappears from the mortal sky, it is not simply becoming more visible in a fixed position in the Fae sky.

It is travelling geographically further into the Fae.

Full moon in the mortal world, no moon in the Fae.

Then the moon begins to enter the Fae through the lighter/twilight regions.

As the mortal moon becomes half, the moon has travelled further into the Fae.

As it becomes a sliver in the mortal world, it has travelled further Darkward again.

Then finally the moon disappears completely from the mortal sky, because it is now entirely within the Fae, at the deepest and darkest end of its journey.

So the phases we see in the mortal world could effectively tell you where the moon is geographically within the Fae.

And that made me look at the Mauthen vase completely differently.

Nina says,

“There was one with no face, just a hood with nothing inside. There was a mirror by his feet and there was a bunch of moons over him. You know, full moon, half moon, sliver moon.”

Full moon.

Half moon.

Sliver moon.

Where is the dark moon?

There isn’t one.

Instead there is Haliax.

A hood with nothing inside.

What if the moons aren’t telling us when to find Haliax?

What if they’re telling us how to find him?

I think the vase might actually be showing a route through the Fae.

You enter the Fae when the moon is full in the mortal world.

Then you follow the moon.

As the mortal moon wanes, the moon travels geographically further through the Fae and you travel with it, from the lighter regions, through the half moon location, towards the sliver moon and progressively Darkward.

Eventually the mortal moon disappears completely.

You have reached the dark moon.

And that is where you find Haliax.

The missing moon on the vase isn’t necessarily missing at all. Haliax occupies its position, the man whose hood contains nothing but darkness.

And then there is the mirror at his feet.

This becomes even stranger when you look at what Felurian actually says about the darker Fae,

“most fae are sly and subtle folk who step as soft as chimney smoke. some go among your kind enshaedn, glamoured as a pack mule laden, or wearing gowns to fit a queen.”

Then,

“many of the darker sort would love to use you for their sport. what keeps these from moonlit trespass? iron, fire, mirror-glass. elm and ash and copper knives, solid-hearted farmer’s wives who know the rules of games we play and give us bread to keep away.”

Moonlit trespass.

Mirror-glass.

And on the vase Haliax has a progression of moons above him and a mirror by his feet.

I don’t think the mirror is just a symbol for reflection.

I think it’s a boundary.

But I also think it is a door.

A barrier separating the ordinary Fae from another part of the world which has been folded away and sealed off.

Which brings me back to Iax and the Doors of Stone.

Felurian tells Kvothe about the greatest of the shapers stealing the moon, and we know Iax was put beyond the Doors of Stone.

I don’t think Iax and Lanre are the same person.

Lanre fought at Drossen Tor, died during the victory where the enemy was defeated and put beyond the Doors of Stone, and Lyra called Lanre back afterwards.

So in this theory Iax is still there.

Beyond the Doors.

But maybe “beyond the Doors of Stone” isn’t simply a prison somewhere in the normal Fae.

Maybe part of the Fae itself was folded away.

Jax’s story gives us the folding house, a place with impossible geography where rooms and directions don’t work as they should. The Fae itself seems to work in much the same way.

So perhaps when Iax was defeated, they didn’t just lock him in a room.

They folded part of the world around him.

Cut it off.

Bound it.

And the mirror on the Mauthen vase represents the boundary between ordinary Fae and that folded-off world.

The mirror keeps things from crossing, just as Felurian tells us mirror-glass prevents “moonlit trespass,” but it is also the doorway to whatever exists on the other side.

I think Kvothe has already seen the entrance.

In his dream after his troupe is killed, he comes across the strange stone structures, two circles of standing stones, and eventually a stone doorway filled with shadow.

I don’t think that image is there by accident.

What if that is the entry point?

The stone circles are the way into the Fae, but they have to be entered under the correct lunar condition.

Full moon.

You pass through the stone doorway and enter the Fae.

Then the moon becomes your compass.

You follow it as it moves geographically further and further Darkward.

Full.

Half.

Sliver.

Dark.

And at the end of the route you reach Haliax and the Seven.

Their lair.

Except it isn’t really a lair.

It’s a guard post.

They are standing in front of the mirror/boundary which keeps Iax and his folded world sealed away.

Which brings me back to the Lackless rhyme,

“Seven things stand before
The entrance to the Lackless door.”

Maybe we’ve all been trying too hard to turn those seven things into ingredients needed to open the door.

What if it is much more literal?

Seven things stand before the door.

The Seven.

The Chandrian.

They are guarding it.

Haliax is the boundary guardian, and the Chandrian are there to make sure whatever is behind that mirror stays there.

Shehyn says,

“Alaxel bears the shadow’s hame.”

A hame is part of a harness. Maybe Haliax doesn’t simply wear shadow as a curse, he is bound to it.

And perhaps Iax has his own binding.

He stole part of the moon’s name.

What if by doing that Iax didn’t just bind the moon to himself, he bound himself to the moon too?

Even after he was defeated and his part of the world was folded away, the connection remained.

So every month the moon comes back towards him.

It leaves the mortal world, enters the Fae and travels progressively Darkward, getting closer and closer to the boundary of Iax’s prison.

At the dark moon, when there is nothing visible in the mortal sky, the moon is entirely in the Fae and has reached the furthest point of its journey.

Maybe it reaches the mirror.

But it cannot cross.

Iax stole the moon, started a war over her and ended up trapped on the other side of a barrier, with the moon returning to the edge of his prison over and over again but never able to reach him.

Which is a fairly horrible fairy-tale punishment.

And maybe that’s also when the binding is weakest.

The moon is closest to Iax, the connection between them is strongest, and Haliax and the Seven have to guard the boundary.

That would explain why Haliax occupies the position of the missing dark moon on the vase.

Follow the moon until it disappears.

That is where you find him.

This might also explain why the Chandrian are so bloody determined to destroy accurate information about themselves.

People already know about the Chandrian. Children sing songs about them. Everyone knows their signs. Simply knowing they exist can’t be the problem.

But what if the old stories contain directions?

The Lackless rhyme tells you there is a door and that Seven stand before it.

Hespe’s story tells you about Jax, the folding house and stealing the moon.

Felurian tells you how the moon actually moves between the worlds and that Iax is beyond the Doors of Stone.

The Adem preserve the names and signs of the Seven.

The old stories about greystones preserve the fact that stone doors can lead into the Fae, particularly under certain moon conditions.

Then the Mauthen vase gives you the actual route.

Full moon.

Half moon.

Sliver moon.

Haliax.

Mirror.

Put all those scraps together and somebody might actually be able to find the place.

Maybe the Chandrian aren’t destroying their history because they don’t want people knowing who they are.

They’re destroying directions.

Arliden was putting the old story back together.

The Mauthens dug up something that showed it pictorially.

And Kvothe has spent his entire life collecting the other pieces without realising what they actually mean.

Then there is the question of what Iax has been doing for the thousands of years he has been trapped there.

Because he is a Shaper.

If part of the Fae was folded away around him, why would he have stopped shaping?

Maybe he didn’t.

Maybe he has spent thousands of years shaping his own cut-off piece of the world.

And maybe the things he made are still trapped in there with him.

Scrael.

Skin dancers.

And whatever other horrible things exist in the frame story that apparently shouldn’t be loose in the mortal world.

That could explain why these things don’t seem like the Fae Kvothe knows.

They aren’t from Felurian’s Fae.

They aren’t necessarily even from the ordinary Dark Fae.

They’re from Iax’s Fae.

The bit that was folded away.

Then Kvothe does what Kvothe does.

He finds the entrance.

He enters under the right moon.

He follows the moon through the Fae, travelling further and further Darkward.

He reaches the Seven.

He finds Haliax.

He thinks he has finally found the monsters who murdered his family.

And he destroys them.

Then he breaks the mirror.

Or breaks whatever binding the mirror represents.

And opens the Doors of Stone.

Except Haliax wasn’t keeping Kvothe out.

He was keeping Iax in.

Suddenly Iax’s folded world is connected to the ordinary Fae again, and through the Fae to the mortal world.

The things Iax has been shaping for thousands of years can get out.

Which brings me to the scrael.

Right at the beginning of NOTW, with the scrael now loose in the mortal world, Kvothe looks up and sees,

“a thousand stars glittering in the deep velvet of a night with no moon.”

No moon in the mortal world.

According to Felurian, the moon is in the Fae.

And if this theory is right, it is at the furthest, darkest end of its geographical journey, exactly where the old boundary used to be.

Except now the guardian is gone.

The mirror is broken.

And the door is open.

There is another mirror quote that probably means absolutely nothing, but I’m throwing it in anyway.

Bredon says,

“Tak reflects the subtle turning of the world. It is a mirror we hold to life.”

And,

“There is a beauty to these things for those with eyes to see it.”

“The subtle turning of the world” is a very interesting choice of words if the trick here is that we have been reading the moon as a clock, when it is actually a compass.

So my current rambling theory is that the Mauthen vase isn’t just a picture of the Chandrian and their signs.

It’s a map.

Enter through the stone door under the full moon.

Follow the moon as it moves geographically through the Fae.

Full, half, sliver.

Keep travelling Darkward until the moon disappears from the mortal sky and reaches the darkest end of the Fae.

There you find Haliax and the Seven standing before the entrance.

At their feet is the mirror, the barrier and doorway to the folded-off part of the Fae.

Behind it is Iax, still bound to the moon and still shaping his own little world after thousands of years.

And if Kvothe eventually breaks that mirror/binding thinking he is finally getting his revenge on Haliax, then he doesn’t just open the Doors of Stone and release Iax.

He opens the door to everything Iax has been making in there with him.

Which might be why, by the time we reach the Waystone Inn, there are scrael crawling around the mortal world and Kvothe is waiting to die.

He didn’t find the Chandrian’s lair.

He found the prison they were guarding.

Cozy dream

In WMF Denna says "“I found a version of it in an old book when I was doing genealogical research for my patron."

I just find this so.... odd? Who would pick a random girl with (presumably) no formal education to go off and do genealogical research? What is her patron up to? Surely he could hire an actual scholar to do this work.

​This is my first theory about the series that I wanted to publicly share with you guys, and it may sound kind of ridiculous, but what the hell, here I go.

------------------------------

​Haliax reminded Cinder about their enemies (enemies of the Chandrian) with the following quote:

​"Who keeps you safe from the Amyr? The singers? The Sithe? From all that would harm you in the world?"

​We were told several important pieces of information regarding The Amyr and The Sithe, but not The Singers.

​Now let's move onto the story that Skarpi told regarding Aleph.

​Aleph granted the angels several capabilities, and there are a few points about this story that made me realize the similarities between angels and Kvothe.

​The Songs of Power were granted to the angels: "The fire filled their mouths and they sang songs of power." – Kvothe was able to wake his sleeping mind and call the True Name of Felurian, subsequently using the name of the wind by singing four lines of music.

​The Silver Star Mark: "Then the fire settled on their foreheads like silver stars..." – When Kvothe enters a state of naming power to subdue Felurian, he notices his reflection in her eyes and describes a white star burning vividly upon his own forehead.

​True Perception given to angels: "The fire flickered in their eyes and they saw into the deepest hearts of men." – He saw Felurian's true nature after his sleeping mind awakened, seeing her not only as the most beautiful creature on earth, but as something darker than that.

​We know that angels are seen to the most powerful, and Chandrians are most probably able to sense them, since Haliax and the others looked up to the sky and knew they had to dip. Same with Cinder during his time as a leader in the bandit band, moments before Kvothe summoned lightning (and later on, they were unable to find his body, meaning he escaped since he knew something powerful was coming, obviously after Marten prays for the 100th time and seeks help from Tehlu and other angels lol). So we can theorize that The Singers are actually angels.

​Kvothe was able to subdue Felurian by singing four lines of music, as I said before. What if music actually allows a person to wake their sleeping mind and see/call the true names of things more easily?

​Maybe angels taught humans about the effects of singing in the field of naming, and humans made it a lifestyle in order to not forget it as decades pass, and that lifestyle being the Edema Ruh.

​This may sound like a weak theory, and I won't really argue with that, but I just wanted to share it with you guys in the hope of getting your opinions on it. Thank you for reading this far!

I've been into anime for a few years now, but I've been a Kingkiller Chronicle fan for a good bit longer, so I've been wondering what a KkC anime would look like.

I'm particularly partial to the idea of Zach Aguilar voicing Kvothe.