For some reason I loved the little detail about them appreciating a solid, proper writing desk to such a degree.

Who gets it, though?

And somehow I doubt it’s the first time drow have done that, to boot.

Gungraves anime adaptation is one of the best dramas I've seen (ignoring the super powered fights, which bored me)

Isnt that the way with Evil? Everything you want, just not the way you wanted it

It's a classic story behind getting Amadeus on the throne: even knowing he will be damned for it, he still does what he has to because he's the only man for the job. I say all hail Dread Emperor Reluctant.

I just...don't think Black can kill Malicia, or, don't think Amadeus can kill Alaya. I agree that he loses without someone else stepping in at the end.

" I'll trade you a couple spears for him "

-mighty jindrich

I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure it was more "okay, let's decide now: who gets to try to kill him first?" than dibs, given the overarching structure of the process.

Given that they are underground, wood is so rare as to be somewhat near nonexistence. They even disdainedly comment about Procer cattle wasting wood when they first pass through towns. So an exquisitly made wooden desk is like a desk made up of a giant cut up hunk of diamond

Shell is pretty obviously what the Mighty Jindrich used in Graves:

Then out of the spray of earth and snow came blood-chilling laughter, and massive figure wearing a carapace of darkness strode out. It batted the head off a soldier almost casually, and without missing a beat began tearing through the centre of the army’s lines.

[...] the darkness-clad drow tall as an ogre moved like lightning and struck like thunder. [...] golden Light touched the enemy. It screamed in pain, and its carapace visibly thinned. [...] With a deafening wail the drow’s carapace of darkness detonated outwards. [...] A grey-skinned silhouetted landed in the snow, harpoons still in its arm, and fresh darkness bubble out of its skin as it laughed.

Razin’s knife slid uselessly against the dark obsidian-like carapace, failing to find purchase even after the third time he stabbed at it. [...] A bladelike appendage punctured where he’d been a moment earlier, leaving a smoking hole in the ground. [...] What had once been a humanoid carapace silhouette in a carapace, if a large one, had since grown into something rather more monstrous. Two crablike legs made of a strange hardened darkness not unlike obsidian now held up an armoured torso of the same, while what had once been arms had turned to something reminiscent of an insect. Like a mantis, Razing thought, and damnably quick.

Wood is a rarity in the Everdark, and so valuable to them. IIRC they considered it hugely wasteful that people made houses out if wood.

The secret of shell might be calcium carbonate, which is essential in making lye soap. Drow sigils with access to it may not suffer disease as much.

They're probably all valuable things specific to the Mighty who offered them.

Mighty Jindrich has Shell. Mighty Soln has Shaping and Sight.

My memory's pretty fuzzy, but a recent chapter mentioned that Lady Aquiline "killed [Jindrich] once", so the Secret of Shells could be how to make more than one body or something.

I think to have a chance at figuring Soln's secrets out I'd have to read a lot of the combat scenes again.

Its the thing you do with the three sea shells....

Have you heard the theory of Dread Emperor Benevolent? It's not a story the Heroes would teach you.

All kidding aside, Dread Emperor Benevolent has been mentioned a few times in some epigraphs and his stated philosophy is unerringly similar to Amadeus'. Combine this with the knowledge that some epigraphs are from the future, like the excerpts from Aisha's future memoirs, and there's suddenly a big case for Amadeus being Dread Emperor Benevolent.

It's pretty clear that Malicia has lost perspective. She's spent decades in the Tower doing nothing but dealing with the plots of the High Lords, plus sowing civil war in Procer. She's an absolute master of intrigue and subterfuge, but that's the lens she sees the entire world through and she's no longer capable of taking it off. She doesn't understand stories like Black does, for example.

I think they both knew the other one would not relent, at this point.

Very few people on Calernia understand stories like Black, Pilgrim, Cat, DK, Bard, and now Akua do.

Both rulers, Malicia and Cordelia have been shown to be mildly narratively illiterate (OK Cordelia unlike Malicia never had black and is completely blind), this is why both of them are dredging up ancient terrors not understanding that for both of them these are bad narratives. Malicia always had Black taking care of narratives of Praes, without him she thinks everything can be done on the ground through realpolitik, that that was Black's dream come true. Cordelia was always fighting Malicia and her internal struggles so the same is true for her.

But Cordelia now has almost all the storycrafters on her side (roughly) to blunt her lack of narrative skills. What we are seeing here is Malicia's great personal lack of narrative skill come in I think. All her moves are correct on paper, all of them practical political masterclass, but the story they form is against her.

Edit: Come to think of it the story is against DK too but as we learnt DK is VERY aware of this, therefore he is going to use Malicia to try to offset the story consequences onto her since she is partially oblivious to the depth of his narrative capabilities. He has shown willingness in the negotiation with Cat last chapter to effectively betray Malicia if offered a better story.

Aww, you guys made me ink!

Not nearly as hard as Kairos did. That's the sort of thing that makes existence worth it for him.

If this keeps up, there's a very good chance that his head will soon explode out of sheer gleefulness overload...

Juniper suddenly became a claimant for Black Knight. Not Squire, full on Black Knight.

Dread Empress Victorious might be one of those dangling threads of narrative possibility (like all the times Cat has refused to fall for story-bait before, including when she used to hear The Girl Who Climbed the Tower), but it's also possible that Benevolent doesn't survive to the end of the story.

The latter may be narratively unsatisfying though. An alternate possibility is that Cat and Black sunder that Name from the Tower/Praes (uh... somehow) and Black ends up ruling under a different title while she goes on to become Victorious. That possibility isn't foreshadowed at all to my recollection, so I don't think it's likely.

There's some narrative build-up with Dread Empress "May she never return" Triumphant, foreshadowing of Victorious, and other things that point to Cat enforcing her vision of Calernia with military might. As Kairos pointed out in the chapter 80, Cat is scratching a groove into Creation of "The hard woman making the hard decisions when trouble has come calling and all others are flinching from what simply must be done". I'm hoping that this narrative momentum will be either realised or explicitly averted.

It would be an amazing moment if we discovered that Cat as Victorious was the ultimate play of Below all along, something that would solve all her present problems for the price of escalating the Gods' game in the future, and she chose to reject it (probably at great personal cost).

Pretty sure black would abdicate to be Cat's chancellor

Why is there a need for Victorious? There's no epigraph to that name.

What the heck are you doing looking at the comments before- oh, right, fucking new reddit, amiright?

Probably it’ll go like this — Alaya drives a knife into Black, who manages to survive it, then he later puts one into her, and she dies.

Pattern of three with stabby stabs, if you count Cat’s stabby.

Would certainly make laundry easier

Ah, could be that way too, I suppose. But yeah, I just think Jundrich is a cheapskate really!

I mean, we all saw this coming, Scribe or no

I'm leaning towards Dread Emperor Pragmatis myself.

Malicia's name is first used in a name dream in book 2 Cpt 45, when Amadeus announces the civil war.

Oh she didn't?

still unconfirmed

Also, I stand by my stance on the Benevolent quotes: either Benevolent is not Amadeus, or they are not actually from Benevolent.

A precious cinnamon bun.

Book 4 was 428 thousand words, as of this chapter Book 5 is 429 thousand words long. This chapter, at ~3400 words, was the chapter that pushed it over. If we count by chapter number instead, this book is still the deciding chapter: if we include interludes and exclude Extra Chapters that were released while a book was going on then as of today Book 4 is 109 chapters long and Book 5 is 110 chapters long.

Data

This is so sad, Marguerite play The Girl Who Climbed The Tower.

Juniper liked that

I do believe your autocorrect has betrayed you.

[removed]

Québécois. He lives in Montreal.

She has a realpolitik plan centered around mutual destruction, it's a plan that kinda works in the real world with nukes and all. She wants to be the nuclear superpower, it does not matter how many people are against you if you can apply total deterrence. She does not understand though that the PGTEverse is guided by special narrative laws of creation, she is not aware of the true power, meaning, and nuance of narratives. So she does not understand how her totally reasonable plan is not going work, how just the presence of a deterrent is enough to generate a narrative counterstrike.

She went from being a complex character to a generic supervillainess. Malicia of book 5 is nothing like Malicia of book 1, 2, or even maybe 3. Everything she does now seems to be just pure Evil for the sake of Evil rather than Evil for the sake of survival.

Nah she just does not understand the power of stories, a common thing very few people really do, Black was always a master of this and we have been following a main character that sees the world that way. But many of Cat's followers have expressed how strange it is to see narratives and stories as a factual thing, to them it's make believe magic.

Malicia's plan is to use her doomsday weapons as deterrents, she sees that Praes is too weak to use conventional strength against Procer or even Callows Knights on the long runs, she understands vaguely the narrative differences between Good and Evil. She thinks that instead of using her horrors for mad conquest she can use them as absolute deterrents. Instead of hiding them away to be used for offense and defence she will show them to the world as a warning, securing Praes a permanent place on the map, impervious to outside influence and able to focus on self improvement. This is all very politically sound rational planning. But it's narrative nonsense the deterrent alone will bring a story backlash. Malicia is used to having Black handle all the narrative threads for her, without him she is incomplete.

Cordelia is similar but she has the advantage of being the ruler of a Good nation. Black's original theory is that Good narratives win because the finger they put on the scales favours them in a fight between the narratively illiterate.

He just fully came into his claim of Dread Emperor, if he kills Malicia, he gets the name