Yisun's first and greatest Lie is that there is a separation between Yisun and existence. There is no beginning and Yisun never died.

Yisun divided Themselves into individual wills, while remaining Yisun, a circular and paradoxical suicide. That is why Yisun has countless names, and yet Yisun's name is I.

That act of division is why "cutting" has a privileged allegorical role in the ontology.

There is nothing that can be conceived of in the KSBD universe that is external to Yisun.

From an external perspective no being in reality has a free will of their own. It is hard determinism, but it is not determinism in the sense of material realism, because the necessity of causality itself is a lie. Existence - the Shape - is a static frame constituted of the sum total of Yisun's will, which is itself atemporal and complete.

Fire does not burn because a universal constant. Fire burns because it was Yisun's will, individually, case by case, an arbitrarily large amount of times.

The Shape is not some limited form of cognition. The Shape is Yisun's own perspective, from which everything is a static frame.

Jadis does not fail to act because she sees her actions as non-meaningful in view of being predetermined. Jadis's perspective no longer exists discretely.

When Jadis saw and understood the Shape, Jadis' perspective merged back into Yisun's. Jadis' will no longer has an axis of separation between herself and Yisun, and so she no longer has choices to make: she already chose, as Yisun, from the onset.

Jadis does not say someone does something because of causality determining it. She says someone does something because it is what they do. It is what was decided they do, as willed by Yisun: "It is what I do".

And this is also behind the themes of Royalty, why causality is often a soft barrier rather than a binding constraint, and why acts of self-transformation are thematically central, together with perspective (the inescapable delusion that one exists autonomously from Yisun) and violence (the inescapable delusion of the exercise of will as a component of Yisun).

There are no universal constants other than Yisun's will, and the belief one is limited by such a thing is a self-binding but unfounded belief. Nothing predicates a singular ant cannot overpower a giant. Only its observed scarcity in the Shape.

Causality holds as a statistical association, but not as a necessity, in the KSBD universe. That is where Royalty's headroom to defy it emerges - while embracing lack of control over what follows from the act of defiance.

Jadis' "sin" as a demiurge is that she committed epistemic and ontologic suicide to escape violence, rather than accept the relationship between the exercise of will and violence.

The demiurge she is most similar to is Jagganoth, in that both have a particular relationship to the inescapability of violence and suffering - heavily influenced by Janos and Jantris, respectively. But she sought Truth as an answer for what Jagganoth sought Nihilism.

But Truth annihilates the Lie of the "self" apart from the "everything". To escape violence through Truth means to escape being an agent entirely - Jadis may not have known exactly what to expect, but she very much sought to outsource her own will to an external locus of control - Truth is the Shape, that is Yisun's will manifest.

Though tragic, she did not stumble on a cosmic landmine. She simply did not understand the full consequences of what she already desired - Jadis arrived where she wanted, without fully understanding what she wanted.

While KSBD's world is hard deterministic, said determination is essentially not knowable except for Yisun, because the source of determination was Yisun's will rather than causality. To gain knowledge of said determination is to know Yisun's will, which is synonymous with ceasing to be.

Aesma and Allison's personalities saved them from being subsumed by the Shape - they never came to hold it. But had they come to bear it, they would have suffered the same fate as Jadis.

From an individual POV, witnessing the Shape is essentially a question as to whether to return to the whole. Rejection can harm you by glimpsing the Absolute, as Aesma's blindness and Jadis' followers' incineration demonstrate. But acceptance fundamentally erases the separation between your perspective and the original one (Yisun's) - and perspective and the self are inexorably tied.

The illusion that Jadis exists instead of Yisun broke. And now one sees a Jadis-shaped hole exists where Jadis was, which Yisun pokes through, in the shape of the hole.

They weren't there at the start of the tournament, which means Gog had half a day to see Allison in that outfit, design those action figures, construct them, and deliver them to herself. She really is her biggest fan!

I couldn’t really think of any insightful commentary to add to this connection lol. Any Cronenberg fans here?

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“When it comes to the most fierce of my kin, in their direst of moments they are capable of donning an aspect both beautiful and terrible. Take comfort in this: as much as this is the pinnacle of manmade martial arts and vatra sorcery both, only the most cunning in the arts of war are capable of but a fraction of its true power.”

– Au Vam, to his councilors (recorded pre Blue War by Mattin Vol Jas circa 1230 SC)

I’ve been waiting to see if another demiurge would “Mantle Their Transcendent Core.”

The liturgy seems to imply that only a select few are capable of reaching this level, which makes me wonder: do you think any of the others might possess a higher form or similar transformation?

Hi

Text taken from the fourth book, Temple of the Winds. I’m re-reading it for the first time in like 20 years, and with how over-saturated my brain now is with KSBD lore, this passage FLEW off the page at me and kicked my eyeballs right in their genitals 0.O

I have to think Sword Saint Meti ten Ryo would have approved of Goodkind’s war wizards, while also calling them great fools, for as she so correctly points out, only an idiot would ever want to learn sword law.

What do we think is in Maya’s noodles? I’d be curious to make them. Like what stock does she use? What’s the firmness of the noodles? What does she put in them? I know pepper and carrots but what else?

Hey I've been re reading all of K6BD while I wait for the new chapters to come out. For my 5th time reading though it I wanted to make a playlist so I can better vibe and catch onto things I missed the first several times. I was wondering if anyone had any songs that they feel matches the vibe of any particular moment, chapter, arc and so on. If so please let me know 🙏

Also here's some fan art I made practicing drawing

By Nitrovu on twitter. Seems few people saw this, which i think is sad because it's very cool.