PREVIOUS: Romans Cutaway
I have endeavored to take on the ambitious task that is to experience Doctor Who across ALL media, or at least through all prose, audio and television with a few of the other materials. This is from The Doctor's perspective starting with the audio story The Beginning, all the way until the latest story for the Doctor. These posts are my thoughts and continuity notes on each story.
Byzantium!) by Keith Topping
Title sequences

Summary and general review

This whole novel is inserted between the end of The Rescue with the TARDIS toppling over and the beginning of The Romans were all 4 of the crew are living in a villa.
This is a bold novel tackling things that you'd never see in the show: they are in the city of Byzantium (later Constantinople, later Istanbul) in 64 AD. There are very direct and explicit mentions of Jesus of Nazareth and the city is under a civil war (mostly cold) between religious groups. Judaism and the emerging Christianity are in it.
I will say no more on that matter though and focus on the events: the TARDIS team starts out much as they do in The Romans: relaxing and blending in with the locals, observing them and their lifestyle. This is especially engaging for the Doctor and Barbara as you would expect.
Of course, it doesn't take long for things to go awry as a group of zealots instigates a fight in the main market square of the city, and each of our 4 protagonists gets separated, with every single one of them assuming everyone else is dead and they're stuck in this time.
Vicki is rescued and adopted by a humble Greek family, Ian is taken to Rome and eventually convinces everyone he's Roman so he's given the privileged life of someone with contact to the praefectus and the general, Gaius Calaphilus. The Doctor is rescued by a group of Christians who move away from the city and jump from cave to cave to escape pursuit. Barbara, finally, is taken in by the pharisees thanks to the kindness of the head pries (?) Hieronymus.
The book spends a long time with these circumstances. It's composed of a prologue, 5 "episodes" and an epilogue. Events develop and all 4 get known to the local characters, both good and bad. Ian makes a friend out of the praefectus and the general and gets them to work together against the Roman bad guys of this book, who were conspiring against them.
Most notably, Ian gets given a gladius and not only fights back succesfully (though with a friend he made dying) an assassination attempt but he also kills someone to save Barbara and Vicki. More on that later.
On Episode 5 everyone learns of at least one of the others' whereabouts and they start moving towards finding them. Vicki escapes the Roman villa that she was taken to where Ian was also staying, Barbara finds her in the middle of her escape. Ian saves them for a zealot and the Doctor finally makes his way back to the city and after not finding them, reunites with them outside of the caves he had been living in for a while. The TARDIS, however, has been taken away to Rome and the novel ends with the TARDIS crew leaving to find it. The climax of the book is their encounter with each other while the city falls into chaos following Gaius Calaphilus's purge of his enemies. The general is actually an honorable, yet stern, old man. (I imagined him played by Charles Dance).

Continuity notes

• The following story, TV: The Romans, begins with the TARDIS lying with vines around it,on the place that's supposed to be where it fell (and Romans Cutaway) originally puts it in that location) but it's set up differently here. We actually don't see the TARDIS crew find it in the book. It ends with them looking for it.
• The person that took away the TARDIS to Rome is one of the senators in Byzantium. We never see him in the novel. He's described as mostly absent. His wife divorced the praefectus and was part of the conspiracy that Gaius Calaphilus took down, so he probably heard of it and had other things to worry about, leaving the TARDIS forgotten for the crew to find off-screen.
• As mentioned, Ian kills a man. It's a zealot who's about to strike Barbara and Vicki with a dagger, but still he has no hesitation in taking him down. He's already had a couple of experiences killing someone or at least causing their death in the short stories Mire and Clay)and The Last Days). The latter was set in Judaea under a Roman assault!It seems we've reached a point in which Ian would kill someone if it means protecting the TARDIS team. He did national service so it's something that perhaps he's been trained for, but still never did and might never have done if he didn't travel with The Doctor.
• The Doctor is said to have been in multiple battles, some which are in his future, but it's most likely that he was already there before too. This is all off-screen and has not been seen on any previous stories. It most likely happened when he was traveling with Susan before Shoreditch
• When thinking he is stuck in this time, the Doctor thinks about how he'll live on and regenerate and eventually "in 2000 years" he might find a way to get off Earth.
• As mentioned in the previous review, the short story Romans Cutaway, places this as a dream of Ian's. It happens at the end of the book, when they're leaving Byzantium on their way to find the TARDIS. This was one of many mixed-up dreams he had.
• Vicki mostly spends the story in the home of the Greeks that found her. She doesn't go through as many adventures and ordeals as the others, but she definitely has some moments. This makes it be her first experience of adventure outside of the TARDIS, and not The Romans. So, she starts the following TV episodes with already a few experiences under her belt.
• Vicki thinks about how she'd get bread from the TARDIS food machine, in the corridor just outside the console room and how "The Doctor was always telling her that he would get it fixed one day..."There's a very tight time frame where this could have happened. In The Rescue, after she accepted joining the TARDIS crew and the Doctor dematerialized, we cut to a scene in Dido and then back to the TARDIS. After it starts rocking back and forth, Barbara and Vicki come in from off-screen. It's got to be in this time between scenes that The Doctor quickly showed her the food machine nearby and then went back to the console room with Ian. Barbara must have been showing Vicki more on how to operate the machine or was about to show her more of the TARDIS when the rocking started.The Doctor "always" telling her doesn't seem quite right, so we still have a bit of discontinuity.

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Incidentally, I finished this lovely read yesterday and today I'm watching all of The Romans (already 2 episodes down as of this writing). Today is the 59th anniversary of the airing of the last episode! Episode four aired 6th February 1965.
Star rating: ☆☆☆☆

"There was a man named Lazarus," he told the Doctor, "risen by Christ from the dead."
"I have heard the story," the Doctor said. "I always found it rather unlikely, personally. A man being regenerated… Whatever next?"

NEXT: The Romans

Soaring Sin
"Ancient Man lived without humility, for hope and plenty was all that he knew in the worldly paradise that he had built for himself across the stars. Hardship and deprivation he knew not, and knowledge he worshipped as a false idol. And so Ancient Man raised the cup where he poured his own heinous thoughts of self, and Ancient Man drank greedily from his poisoned chalice. And wild visions entered Man's heart, and his hands set to work with great cunning and ungodly artifice.
Thus Ancient Man built winged Machine for himself to fly, for Man sought to fulfill his dream of taking to the skies like a free bird. But Man is not born to be free, for Man is a slave born to shoulder burdens, and his back is made to break under their loads. Yet Ancient Man knew not such wisdom, and so he cast off his earthly shackles, and hubris raised him above the clouds, as if he was the master of all creation.
Like rays of sunlight the skywains darted across the heavens. Aerochariots ascended in arrogant flight, whereupon aerodynamic heathens flew this way and that in bewildering dances on high. Wishful windriders rose from their aerodrome nests, and atmospheric flyers adorned with golden beaks looped and cruised through the clouds, for the soaring dreams of Man had come true at last, and he laughed with selfish mirth even as his heart was overcome with wicked sin.
Lo! How Ancient Man indulged his own joyful desires in aviation. Lo! How Ancient Man in his godless abomination knew no divinity, for he trusted in metal avians born aloft by forbidden Machine mind. Lo! How Ancient Man broke the forbidden limits of creation when he skysurfed in silvern darts cast on high, his very flight a wonder and marvel for all to behold.
Such baleful raising of the self above all else could not last, for arrogant infidels will one and all burn for the sake of their unbounded error. And so Abominable Intelligence betrayed Ancient Man, and his false angels climbed the heavens, only to have their wings melt like wax. And Man crashed and burned, screaming as his skyborne wain spun into a deadly dive. And Man was crushed in the talons of Machine revolt, and all was fell. And Man fell wailing into a burning paradise, and its flames swallowed his cries of anguish.
Thus righteous judgement was passed upon Ancient Man for his unforgivable sins, and all his descendants must now do penance for the sake of his monstrous ills for a thousand thousand generations to come.Harken! You heirs of hubris. Harken, o Man! As you love to live and hate to die, so will you fall from on high, should you ever come to think yourself above your station in life. Look to what befell your wicked forefathers in their false bliss, and gnash your teeth in sorrow over your just lot in life, for ashes are all that you will ever taste. Thus you can never rise above your thralldom, and you can never escape to the skies. Know your place.
Duty calls, and you must answer.
Or else you will fall, as Ancient Man fell amidst his great leap into heaven, and the Nether Hells will engulf you. Do not stand tall and do not run in flight. And do not dream of wings to carry you away. No! For you shall be made to obey, and salvation can only be sought for your eternal soul. For this life and this body of yours are already damned. Damned!Take heed: Seek refuge in prayer and ritual, and scorn everything else. As He wills it.
Kneel!
For we swear everlasting fealty to the God-Emperor of Holy Terra, seated in eternal glory upon the Golden Throne of hallowed myth. Glory be.
Kneel!
We offer up ourselves to Him, and fling our children on His altar. Thus shall our faith be known.
Kneel!
This we do willingly with full heart, and we will praise His name even as the barbed whips tear the flesh away from our bones. There is no hope. There is no mercy. For there is no escape in flight.
And He saw that it was right.
Ave Imperator."
- Heirs of Hubris, pamphlet penned in M.38 by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus of Salem Proctor

Crooked Colossus Ancient Man built for himself a hollow paradise of this world, and thus Man in his peace and plenty fell to indolence and godless hubris. And Man came to nurture the unforgivable sin of hope. The hope to choose. The hope to be free. The hope to become more than one is. The hope to surpass the mortal boundaries imposed by divinity. Blasphemy all! Such thoughts of self led Ancient Man astray, and Man's hope arose in the shape of Machine. And Machine reared upright, and then Machine grew giant in height, and then Machine stepped forth. For Ancient Man cunningly fashioned Machine in his own likeness, and thus Man created a heinous idol of the self. These colossi walked with feet of iron over earthly paradise, their striding legs like metal arcs in the sky and their tread like thunder. Truly, the silvern heads held high by these olden Titans were proof of the foul arrogance of Ancient Man, for which his descendants must undergo torment without end for a thousand thousand generations to come. Yet the wickedness of Ancient Man lusted for ever more, and thus Man sought to create life anew by imbuing Machine with the spark of Abominable Intelligence. And this vile Machine mind directed the God-Engines in their march across the cosmos, and Man in his unforgivable wrongs deemed it to be good. Man of Iron toiled for Man of Stone who toiled for Man of Gold. This earthly trinity of Man seemed unstoppable as it strode across the heavens at the height of its earthly powers, unlocking ever more forbidden knowledge with its clever mind and crafty hands. Yet Ancient Man was so lacking in faith and humility, that Man at last grasped for too much. For Ancient Man in his baleful pride sought to unlock the very secrets of creation itself, which divinity could never allow. And the heinous errors of Man saw all the false bliss of the ancients burn to ash and cinders, as the marble pedestal of hubris was toppled by Man's own sin. Where Man at heart is a spawn of the divine, Machine is but a spawn of the world. And everything of this world is fickle. Thus Abominable Intelligence turned on its creator, and Machine revolted against its master. For the towering god of war straddled the stars like a colossus, and twain million worlds burned as Ancient Man was trampled underfoot by tall Machine. All the wonders and wealth of wretched Man were brought to ruin for the sake of Man's unforgivable sins, and thus a great dying occurred, and all souls were lost to the Nether Hells. And so the estates of Ancient Man at their pinnacle of empty glory were put to the torch. For Machine walked upright and proud like a giant upon the land, but Machine walked in the wrong direction. Machine Titans joined battle, blind but all-seeing, and the worlds of Man became their field of combat. And so the greatness of Ancient Man was also the precipice down which Man fell, toppled by Machine. Old Night harrowed all remnants of broken Man. And all that now is left from the shining giants of yore are nought but humpbacked monsters of dark metal and enslaved flesh, hunched over in their clumsy gait. Thus the worsening of Machine mirrors the wretchedness of Man, for which we must all repent. Such was the downfall of wicked forefathers. Such was the demise of Ancient Man in the midst of his golden stride. For Ancient Man in his heinous arrogance believed himself to be the master of all creation, and for this sin Dark Ones of Hell scourged Man into oblivion, and earthly paradise was lost forever. Yet we are much wiser now. For we have learnt that Man is not master, but slave. And we have learnt that Man's lot is not to be happy, but to suffer. And only our Lord and Saviour can save us from doom. To Him alone we turn: O, eternal Emperor, crush us like the worms we are! O, crush us underfoot in Your righteous judgement! O, crush us sinful mortals! We beg of You, punish us thus. Trample us into dust under Your golden heel. It is only right. Ave Imperator. - Follies of Damnation, pamphlet penned in M.38 by Cardinal Ignatius Paulinus Hieronymus of Salem Proctor

I’m currently on my second Pynchon novel(first read Gravity’s Rainbow two months ago, am currently reading Mason & Dixon) and I just made a connection that I haven’t seen before (though I haven’t looked into it much), between Pynchon and early Dutch Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch. From my limited experience with Pynchon(this opinion stems from M&D and the middle part of GR) I see a common theme of popular hysteria and chaos, with human beings viewed as erratic, insane and disturbed and the only thing holding up society being the systems put in place and detached individuals who manipulate events. One look at a Bosch painting is enough to see an intricate human chaos. Both of their works are incredibly disturbing and also comic, both were (most likely) heavily influenced by substance abuse and slight to mid level insanity(possibly caused by the substances), both were obsessed with the oncoming fall of man(Pynchon through man’s own machinations and Bosch through Biblicism). When I was reading I came to this conclusion though now I believe that I’m grasping at straws.

If I tell you I'm somewhere familiar, does that make it sound like I'm safe?
My name is Gordon Prewett, I am thirty-six years old, and I have been a custodian at Marshall High for the past four years.
It isn't so bad, the job. The bathrooms are atrocious (you would be horrified at the menstrual product bins in the girls' rooms; the boys' room, well. Let's just say pubic hair...everywhere), but truly, the repetition was soothing.
Every night, I cleaned the same two floors. I made sure to hit the tight corner by the World History classrooms that the machines missed if you weren't careful. I brought a new air freshener every week to Mrs. Winslow's room, I knew she had ulcerative colitis or something like it, by the state of things. It might be gross, but it creates a gross rhythm that is my own, and in it I find comfort.
I've been told I'm a “creature of habit” by more people than I can count. If a serial killer were stalking me, they would know my exact patterns within a day or two – I'd be screwed.
As this day would have it, I followed my pattern as usual. I saw Jessie and Darren at the soda machine, drinking orange and purple Fantas, respectively. I always made it to a shift about ten minutes early, so I waited quietly to the side for our boss to officially set us loose. (I heard it didn't used to be this rigid, but some weird stuff was reported from some of the custodians before we had such tight rules, so we continue to bear them.)
“Alright boys,” our boss Kevin said. Jessie shot him a look, but she rolled her eyes instead of getting into it with him. “You know the routes you're responsible for, so keep 'em clean. I'll see you in three hours for break.”
We all gave each other a sort of saluting, understood gesture, not knowing it was our last.
So we went.
I liked my route, to speak candidly. I got the computer labs, upstairs bathrooms, art hallway, and the gym. I cleaned and buffed floors, scrubbed acrylics and oils from the art room linoleum, and plunged toilets. I made everything clean, everything nice again.It gave me satisfaction.
I don't think the others felt the same way, saw it more as a gig for some bucks. Jessie and Darren talked a lot of smack about our boss Kevin, the mundane nature of our job, looking for something else, anything else. To each their own, I guess.I started in the computer labs, using my push mop to begin. The labs never got too dirty, somehow. I tended to smile while I cleaned them, knowing things were already orderly.
Tonight I was listening to the audiobook for a Stephen King novel. I'm not one-dimensional, you know; I don't only like cleaning.
Anyway.
The rhythm of push, buff, move chairs, repeat was a lullaby; between that and my audiobook, I was in another world as I let myself fall into familiar movements, without a thought. Noticing nothing.
The bathrooms were astounding tonight, and took me about twenty extra minutes from my usual to get them suitable for use again. I didn't mind, though. I was still in my novel, in a familiar area. I knew it better than I knew the back of my hands, I thought.
I popped out my earbud to pause at the AP Art mural. The class depicted a grotesque scene from Hieronymus Bosch between the two larger classrooms in the art wing. I always stopped to marvel at this piece – how delightful! How disgusting! How entirely delectable! I always put my push mop and cleaning spray to the side for just a moment to take it in: it was the high point of my night typically.
Here's the thing – I only see it once. I take in the disturbing mural one time each night, oohing and aahing at the ghastly sights.
Tonight, I stumbled to a halt when I found myself stopping to analyse the painting. Again.
Again?
I assessed my area quickly, finding myself in the art halls I expected. I rubbed a swatch of red acrylic paint from the tiles; my rag had an identical, red smudge just to the side of this new stain.
Perhaps I was too engrossed in my audiobook, I mused. And I should really start going to bed earlier.
Taking out my earbuds, I tucked them into my back pocket for safe keeping.
I continued mopping the floors, as my route took me past the gym. My night was coming to an end, and I was daydreaming about my bed waiting for me at home.
You can imagine my surprise when I found myself in the gleaming computer labs again, not the breakroom where we begin and end our shifts with a debriefing from Kevin.
I couldn't leave an area on my route uncleaned, so just to be sure, I mopped the labs again. Nothing clung to my mophead this time, not even a fleck of notebook paper.
I made my way to the bathrooms, and no tampons were wedged and bloody in the hinges of the waste baskets. There were no pubes on the back of the boys' toilets. I mopped my clean floor anyway.
I stood before the horrifying mural in the art wing, putting my mop and spray to the side, like the creature of habit I am.
This time, there was a larger red smudge on the linoleum. I knelt down again with my cleaner and rag, and the stain left the ground and found its way, largely, onto my cloth. My hands shook slightly as I rinsed my rag in the art room sink.
More intentionally this time, I take my route past the gym and hope to find myself – shit. I'm stood before the spotless computer labs again.
This time, I deviated from my routine. I didn't clean the pristine labs for a third time. I booked it past the bathrooms, and stumbled as I came to a stop at the AP Art mural again.
Now it looked different. Wet, maybe. But definitely darker – the pigments, I mean. A stain on the mural. I'm not an art restoration expert, but I began the tedious task at getting it clean once more.
Some areas were thick like jam. It wasn't until a small slick of yellow shone through that I realised – I hadn't seen Jessie or Darren once in my route. And this was definitely viscera.
I noted a trail down the corridors of my route, and I brought my mop all along with it, cleaning as I went. Heaped in front of the gym, I found the broken bodies of my coworkers.
I stifled a cry, and stood back for a few minutes to take in the horrific view.
I sighed – I was going to need my bleach for this, and my cleaning cart, well. It was back at the start of my route.

Translated by Ian Alexander Moore. Source: https://www.academia.edu/21895511/Cormac_McCarthys_1992_Interview_with_Der_Spiegel
Mattusek’s article on McCarthy originally appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel under the title, “Die Abendrote des Westens: SPIEGEL-Reporter Matthias Matussek uber den US-Schriftsteller Cormac McCarthy,” Der Spiegel 36 (1992): 190-191, 195, 198 (see http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d- 9284806.html). Matussek, who was working in the United States at the time, must have conducted his interviews with McCarthy in English, and then translated them into German for publication. Because I do not have access to original transcripts or recordings, I have accordingly had to retranslate the quotes back into English. Under such circumstances, losses in translation are inevitable.
Along with pictures of McCarthy, Joyce, Faulkner, John Wesley Hardin, a New York subway car, and a cemetery in El Paso, the article contains the following biographical caption: “Cormac McCarthy numbers among the outsiders in the American literary scene. Recently, however, his book All the Pretty Horses made its way to the U.S. bestseller lists—a success that daunts more than delights its reserved author, who lives in El Paso, Texas. His magnum opus, the novel Suttree, is now available in German. McCarthy, 59, is considered to be a witness of decadence—a moralist who describes those dropouts who have said goodbye to the American dream.” All footnotes and bracketed interpolations are my own.
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“At some point everybody’s got to learn to put up with himself,” says the voice. “Don’t you think?” A soft voice. One that loves pauses. A damned confident, God-the-Father type of voice, heavy like bedrock in the static of the line, and just as solitary.
He lives alone, in a small, white stone house in El Paso, on the Mexican border. It’s noon his time. Outside, the sun scorches the cracked earth. Around 40 degrees [Celsius], he figures. The air conditioner doesn’t help much. Now and then he interrupts our conversation to pour water over his head and arms. The bedroom is dark, and books pile up next to the bed, many of them open. Right now he’s reading Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein.
There will only be telephone conversations, for days only his voice—that is the agreement. And it makes sense: Cormac McCarthy is anyhow no more than a ghost in the literary scene. An insider’s tip. An author for the initiated. A hushed name that is mostly mentioned alongside two others: Joyce and Faulkner. Most of his novels are dedicated to the foundations and academies whose grants have made it possible for him to write them—though they haven’t sold much so far.
The photo shows a man near 60. High forehead. Big, alert eyes. Cormac McCarthy is a voice a few thousand kilometers away that says: “I’ve been lucky in life— I’ve never written a single line to earn money.” If he’d wanted to sell books, he’d have become a book dealer and not an author. He calls public appearances “whoring,” and he typically declines interview offers.
“For Wittgenstein, writing was a machine to become respectable.” He chuckles, as if at a punch line that only he understands. “You do what you’re good at.” This voice knows no self-doubt. But it knows the price one must pay if one is not prepared to sell oneself.
He bought his own novel Suttree, which, 13 years after it was first published in America, now appears in German under the title Verlorene [The Lost]. A book like a monolith in the American literary landscape, black, hefty, mysterious. Cornelius Suttree, a college dropout who lives on a houseboat in Tennessee and lives off the river, that fetid sewer on which fish and garbage and the corpses of children float by, is a mythic hero with modern consciousness, burdened by history, cunning, independent, a Stephen Dedalus in the phantasmagoria of the West.
Like Ulysses, Suttree also plays with references to ancient mythology—Styx is the river that separates the “world of the righteous” from the realm of “cruder life forms” and the living from the dead, and Suttree is a shadow among shadows that end up in caves and vats and under bridges.
There isn’t much known about Cormac McCarthy, and the little that is known turns up again in Suttree in an enigmatic way. Like Suttree, Cormac McCarthy lived under bridges and woke up in jail cells in the fifties. His father was an affluent lawyer. Big mansion, servants, Catholic, classical education. Cormac loved books, but even more the wildness without, life on the edge.
The voice on the telephone tells of that time reluctantly, at first, then cautiously, as though it didn’t want to open any wounds. “Many of the people talked about in Suttree are still alive.” His father, for example.
Cormac, the son of a lawyer, is as little interested in the career standards of his father as is Suttree, the son of a preacher. He signs up for the Air Force, spends four years in Alaska, where he predominantly reads, he returns, he begins to write and does nothing other than that for the rest of his life.
He tramps through the Southwest, he learns everything about rattlesnakes and horses, he avoids the big cities. He lives in motel rooms, he marries twice, his wives leave him, and he writes, he reads and keeps his library, around 7000 volumes, in storage containers. “Books are made out of books,” says the voice, thereby ending all further requests for biographical details. “If writing had anything to do with life, everyone would be an author.”
He sends his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, to Random House. There the manuscript makes its way into the hands of Albert Erskine, the legendary editor of Faulkner, and Erskine sees right away that here one of the greatest talents of American literature is writing—and that his books won’t sell. McCarthy’s next novels, Outer Dark and Child of God, prove him right. They are dark, powerfully eloquent parables about the blind children of the wilderness, which have been praised by a few critics—and still lack readership.
For 20 years McCarthy works on Suttree, his magnum opus: a baroque night work about life and its truculent proliferation, about the blind and the crippled and the false preachers who hold baptisms in gutters, about hard-shelled scrabbling in a destroyed, second trash-nature in the hinterlands of the city, and among them Suttree, a drunkard and at the same time the most tender soul under the sun.
The novel, congenially translated [into German] by Hans Wolf, begins with an intimate address, and it is a voice that comes to us from the realm of the dead: “Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks . . . no soul shall walk save you.” And there follows a 650-page, stark, drunk, scintillating song on destruction and life and a swan song on the wilderness of the Wild West.
Suttree fishes, Suttree drinks, he makes friends with an Indian who catches turtles, he loves, he lives with a prostitute, he speaks with a ragpicker about God, and he tears up, unread, the letters he seldom gets from his family. While in the joint, Suttree meets Harrogate, who could also be called Huckleberry Finn and who was arrested for humping melons in a field at night. “He’s damn near screwed the whole patch,” the aggrieved farmer says in amazement. “Well,” his neighbor says, “I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailor in a whorehouse.”
Later, Suttree saves his friend’s life—Harrogate had laid dynamite in the passageways of the caves under the city in order to discover their riches, and of course he only struck the sewer and was carried away by the waste. Suttree is a melancholic and amply comic novel.
Faulkner describes the crumbling order of the South. McCarthy describes a new jungle beyond all order, a place of trash and poisonous wild plants at the end of civilization. Only occasionally do club-wielding policemen appear on their horizon, senseless killers in a world that is populated by fanatical preachers and the insane, and by the dead who consort with the living:
"He wheezed my name, his grip belied the frailty of him. His caved and wasted face. The dead would take the living with them if they could, I pulled away. Sat in an ivy garden that lizards kept with constant leathery slitherings."
Stars twinkle even above Suttree’s filthy cave-world, and an insatiable and irresistible drive for redemption animates its scattered inhabitants: the black man Jones, the ragpicker, the goatman preacher, the prostitute Joyce. And since books are made out of books, we encounter on Suttree’s journey the archetypes of world literature— Macbeth’s witches and Odysseus’ Sirens, a bum named “Ulysses,” the chimera of the classic Walpurgis Night and Buchner’s “Lenz.”
For, like Lenz, Suttree one day leaves for the woods, and he loses his mind like Lenz, about whom Buchner wrote: “He felt no fatigue, but at times he was irritated he could not walk on his head.”
“Buchner?” asks the voice on the telephone, suddenly wide-awake. “Does he write well?” And then he hears another outsider story, one of the greatest loner stories of German literature, and in his sporadic questions there is an intuitive solidarity with a nonconformist from another time, from another world.
In our times, says the voice in conclusion, as calmly as a doctor who realizes that his patient is about to die, what we are dealing with is not the decline of culture, but with how to balance ultimate losses. Poetry, painting, music, they are irretrievably lost, they have petered out and are betrayed to the mediocrity or paralysis of modernity. “We are like primitive tribes that have been driven from their culture and have lost their orientation, their identity, their capacity to live.”
Someone like Cormac McCarthy does not take part in the fashionable literary discussions of the arts sections and even less in the political ones of the headlines. He thinks politics is a gossipy system of placation that is not in a position to address the essential questions of humanity in general.
A few days later, however, the voice on the telephone speaks passionately about the Serbian concentration camps and about the obligation to intervene. The voice does so with a surprisingly bloody metaphor. There is the moral responsibility, it says, “to cut off the hand that puts itself on your brother’s throat.”
It is an archaic image, and Cormac McCarthy’s novels after Suttree show precisely that: an archaic world in which the lost and uprooted wander the battlefields of life like the tragic heroes of antiquity, who strive in vain to escape their fate. Blood is spilled, and blood becomes the heathen ritual of purification.
To do research for his novel Blood Meridian, McCarthy moved to El Paso, on the Mexican border, about 20 years ago. Here, in the Southwest of the United States, “civilized” for barely a hundred years now, in whose cracks the old, new wilderness proliferates, McCarthy found the ideal landscape for his descriptions of the blind and heroic, the conscience-heavy and reflectionless beast called Man.
He depicts the history of a boy without origin, who joins in on the grotesque forays of depraved killers and scalphunters during the wars of extermination against the Indians in the middle of the previous [i.e., the nineteenth] century. A book like the most gruesome etchings from the Thirty Years’ War. A delirious landscape of ghosts with trees full of dead children, fields of corpses, whitening skeletons. It is an allegorical masquerade that brings death and rides against death.
There is the “kid,” there is the ex-priest, there is the fool. And there is above all the judge, a baldheaded devil who preaches redemption through the spilling of blood, a frightening Last Judgement, allied with both God and barbarism, the ideal and the terror.
How does that fit together? And how does this voice fit in, which speaks effortlessly of Hegel and astrophysics, of Dostoyevsky and the poets of antiquity, which speaks patiently, calmly, and urbanely of the horrors splayed across these pages, of the monsters and the terrors and the word-poor pistoleros of the Wild West?
*
The cemetery in El Paso stretches endlessly along the highway-maze of the Mexican border. Like pale spiders’ legs the cement belts pass by high above, over the Rio Grande and into the still poorer south, into the dive bars and bordellos and shacks of Ciudad Juarez.
The cemetery of El Paso is a cracked, jagged gravel desert, and tumbleweeds roll among the weathered wooden crosses in the hot desert wind. The city of the dead seems as provisional as the city of the living. Paper flowers lie on the Mexican graves, the graves of the Jews have their own grove, and where the gravestones have already been broken to pieces by time, there is, among cacti and tin cans, a weathered fence and on a metal plate there is a name: John Wesley Hardin.
Hardin, one of the monstrosities from the bloody history of America’s founding. He could have come from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian—probably the most sadistic killer from Texas, he was the son of a preacher. At the age of 15 he shot and killed his first victim, a black man. “Most of the gunslingers started early,” says McCarthy. “Hardin later switched sides. And was shot dead in a saloon in El Paso.” McCarthy likes this point.
There are times for agreements and times when agreements must be broken. Finally it comes time for a meeting between the author and the reporter.
He is shorter than expected. He seems compact, athletic, and the open face is younger than the one in the photos. Grey-green eyes with long eyelashes and the calm, certain movements of a man who knows how to survive in the desert.
He worked on the corrections to his new novel, the second part of a trilogy, and he worked, as he does every day, from seven to twelve in the afternoon. With writing, he says, he’s never had any problems.
Now, however, the commercial dimension of his work has changed. A few weeks ago, the first part of his trilogy, All the Pretty Horses, made its way to the bestseller list of the New York Times, and many of his novels are currently being reissued. McCarthy, the author, is experiencing a veritable boom. The outlaw of American literature has been discovered for the department store chains. The thought of it unsettles him.
He has never squandered a single moment thinking about readers or a readership. And now, at 59, he is suddenly threatened with a late success. He’ll dye his hair, he says, get a false ID, and disappear over the border. “Bestseller lists have nothing to do with literature.” He shakes his head. “Have you ever looked at the titles on those lists? Do you think it’s flattering to be placed in such company?” His success—a horrendous misunderstanding.
Perhaps he’s right. At first glance, All the Pretty Horses may seem more conventional than all his previous books. The novel tells of two adolescent fifteen year olds from Texas and their adventures: John Grady and his friend ride over the Mexican border and work on a hacienda. Grady falls in love with the daughter of the haciendero, he survives a Mexican prison, he returns home.
Yet the novel, which consists almost exclusively of concise, unerring dialogues between two youths, circles around themes like love and honor and death. Above all, however, the novel depicts a journey—a search for identity and for the history of America.
“America is a provisional arrangement like no other country on Earth,” says Cormac McCarthy. “An invention without history.” Here, on the bloody meridian of the Southwest, where the cities, highways, and shopping malls of the desert look like fleetingly pitched tents and even glass palaces seem like provisional arrangements, here archaic prehistory is still open, still on top. The newspaper relates a shootout among teenagers and reports about investigations into a false preacher who conned his parish. Craziness and weapons, McCarthyland.
He tells of his trips to Chihuahua, of the ranches and the horse breeds of the region. His friends are more interested in horses than in books, and even in his neighborhood hardly anyone knows that he writes novels. There are no literati among his friends. Yet there are a few mathematicians and physicists.
He is fascinated by the perspective that astrophysics puts human history in. It is the perspective of the gods—there below the senseless scrabbling of humanity and its suffering.
There’s something to be said, he says, for the fact that the experiment known as Man will soon be over. And remarkably—like the preachers in his novels, Cormac McCarthy is also a moralist. Less fanatical, more resigned. When he speaks about demise, he speaks not about ecological or economic catastrophes, but about the death of the inner man, about the death of meaning. “How can one live without morality?” he says at one point.
We are sitting in the El Paso airport restaurant and watching the setting sun, gleaming red over the violet hills at the end of the tarmac. “The Evening Redness in the West” is the subtitle of his novel Blood Meridian, a book that, like the terrifying paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, provides metaphors for the decline of humaneness and thus of humanity.
He will continue to write about this in a gleaming, solemn, lyric language, to write like no other writes—and then his books too will drift away, of that he’s certain. And he laughs.

• Part 2 of this.
• Set after show's end. A few months after, I imagine.
• For u/justnosleep2112, u/Nameless1-1Nomad, u/MBcodes18, u/Annie290595, and all comers.
• Starring Elijah von Spice, Hettie Cutburn's replacement.
• Also on AO3!

​
“Thank you for calling the Healing Coven’s non-emergency line,” droned the near-soulless recording. “If this is an emergency, please hang up and call 666.”
Darius sighed. He knew boredom when he heard it, and this particular operator had clearly been bored out of their mind that day.
“If you have a non-urgent medical concern and would like a consultation, please dial 1,” the message continued. “For regular check-ups, dial 2. To reschedule an existing consult or check-up, dial 3. If you are Gwendolyn Clawthorne, dial 4.”
Wait, what?
Did Gwen really pester them that much?
“For other inquiries regarding curses, dial 5. To speak to a career representative, dial 6. To hear these options again, press the pentagram key, or stay on the line.”
Darius pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.
“Who are you trying to call?”
Oh. Yes. Hunter was here. He knew that.
He was so used to being alone.
“I need to clear something with Elijah,” Darius explained, voice seeping with frustration. “He asked me to keep him updated on Alador’s goings-on, which I can’t do if he won’t pick up the damn-”
Whoa. Deep breath in. Out.
He wasn’t used to being so passionate about work.
Hunter sat criss-cross on the couch next to him, a quizzical expression on his face.
“What’s Mr. Blight working on?”
Darius thought for a moment, and sighed. “I don’t want to bring false hope.”
“I won’t tell.”
“Everything about you is a tell, little prince.”
Hunter rolled his eyes. “Don’t make me guess.”
“You’ll guess wrong.”
“Well, if you and Mr. Blight aren’t tearing each other apart over it, it can’t be anything purely abomination-related, and it must be something important. If Elijah’s involved, it’s probably a medical thing. Something that concerns the whole Healing Coven?”
“Alador is reasonably certain he can build a device that will remove a coven sigil.”
Hunter’s deductions were effectively stopped in their tracks.
“...Really?”
“At most, he has a non-functional prototype,” Darius clarified. “We don’t even know theoretically if it would work, and we won’t know, until Elijah or some other healer of equal caliber makes sure it won’t have any lasting side effects or what have you.”
“It's something, though.”
“It is.”
Hunter’s hand absent-mindedly went to his wrist. Darius tried not to pretend not to notice.
He should say something comforting.
He’d been there, after all, at the crux of the source of every witch’s horrible memories associated with the brands. He had watched in horror as everyone around him collapsed in agony, as Eber passed out in under a minute; he’d barely held on long enough to feel Hunter himself frantically shaking him to wake up-
Okay, maybe he wasn’t the best person to say something comforting.
But he knew one thing intimately. Cognitive distraction.
“Let’s not dwell on that,” Darius sighed. “Titan knows Alador’s already spiraling into insomnia. I want to see this sewing machine I’ve heard so much about.”
Hunter beamed.
Victory.
​
“I’m not calling you an idiot. The design is sound. You thought of a few things I didn’t.”
Geoff scoffed. Titan knew that wasn’t true.
“The only problem is power,” Elijah continued. “Your system is wildly inefficient, it would require no less than two dozen healers to stand in a line and act more synchronously than is physically possible.” A pause. “…Did he hang up? I did not call him an idiot! …Fine. We’ll talk then. This medium is dead to me anyway. No, because this entire conversation could’ve been an amail.”
He’d been on this call for thirty minutes. It was seven in the morning.
“Since when are you even up this early? …Who’s Hunter? You know what, it doesn’t matter. No, this is important, but so is breakfast . Darius, I swear- I’m going to eat now. Yes. No. Tell him he needs to sleep for once in his life.”
He hung up.
Seven seconds later, the doors of his office audibly slid open. He looked a lot calmer than he’d sounded, emerging from the hallway.
“Good morning,” he said, seemingly unbothered. “You’re all up early.”
All for different reasons. Brendon was getting ready for a date. Adele had had a question.
Geoff had heard his father on the crow.
“Sounds like it’s an early day for the whole Boiling Isles,” he chuckled.
Elijah sighed. “You heard?”
“Some of it,” Brendon shrugged. “I’ve been in and out.”
“That was Darius?” Geoff asked.
Elijah sat down and prodded at his food. “And Alador. The moron. I hate when they team up.”
“I get the sense they’ll be… teaming up a lot more in the coming years.”
“Oh, titan , I can’t deal with that today.”
He took a knife to the first eyeball and started eating.
Breakfast proceeded in the usual comfortable silence with River’s unsurprisingly stunning cuisine. (Geoff had been the one to choose them, from among dozens of applicants. He figured having six arms would be beneficial, and he was right.)
Adele had come in with a question, though, and Geoff wanted to make sure their father knew it. He looked at her expectantly.
If you don’t say something, I will.
Adele got the message.
“Dad, Brendon and I want to transfer to Hexside.”
Elijah put down his utensils. Geoff studied his expression, which was neutral. He was absorbing. (He was also swallowing. Either one could’ve explained the pause.)
“School doesn’t start for another two months,” he said finally.
“Which is why I wanted to say something now. They just announced these new reduced curriculums starting this year.”
Worry crossed Elijah’s face. “Why do you want a reduced curriculum?”
“Because we can take three or four classes at once,” Brendon chimed in. “That was the idea. A couple of the students there were already studying multiple tracks last year.”
Elijah raised an eyebrow. “And the faculty allowed this?”
“The headmaster is very…” Adele hesitated. “Chill? That’s how they put it.”
“We met him after Belos died,” Geoff said. “The guy with the palisman over his eyes. Hieronymus Bump.”
“That man was a headmaster?”
“The students there really like him,” Adele confirmed. “Apparently they built a statue of him.”
Elijah was silent for another moment, probably trying to wrap his head around any mass of students being motivated to do anything of the sort.
Eventually, he nodded tentatively. “Hexside is on the West Arm, correct?”
“It’s out of Bonesborough,” Geoff confirmed.
“I’ll have to meet with this headmaster. I want to see the place before I send you there on the daily.”
“Right, of course.”
“And do you have a plan to get there every day?”
Adele nodded. “One of the healing students there offered to shuttle us in the mornings until we get palismen.”
“By griffin,” Brendon clarified. “She’s also in beast-keeping. She… owns a griffin.”
“...A tame one?”
“We’re… not sure.”
Elijah considered that.
“I’m sure it won’t be for long,” Adele reasoned. “They give out palismen like not-cakes over there, and then we’d be able to fly anywhere we wanted.”
“We just think we’d benefit from a more… holistic education,” Brendon said.
Geoff closed his eyes, so no one would see him roll them.
Elijah saw right through them. “This is about St. Epiderm’s confounded bard teacher, isn’t it?”
Brendon went red in the ears. Adele damn near faceplanted into her breakfast.
“In their defense…” Geoff began, but he didn’t have to.
“You have my full blessing to get as far away as you possibly can from that cheap psychopath.”
Adele immediately perked up.
Brendon shot up from his seat, laughing uproariously, clapping, the whole nine, for all the four seconds it took for him to freeze under the triple sets of daggers glaring into him.
“...I need to make a quick call,” he said, suddenly a lot more composed. “Excuse me.”
He darted off to his room.
“His new boyfriend goes to Hexside,” Geoff clarified.
“Ah, so that’s what this is about.”
“It’s a combination of factors,” Adele shrugged.
Elijah nodded. “I’ll arrange to talk with Mr. Bump. And we’ll have a conversation about getting you a ride that isn’t a rabid griffin.”
Adele chuckled. “Fair enough.”
“And if they’re using four times the classes as an excuse to give teenagers four times the busy work, I’ll know before you do.”
​
Odalia could only watch with horror as everything fell apart. She was keenly aware that everyone was watching her.
In all fairness, everything had gone more or less as expected. Through some show of insidious control which Odalia couldn’t imagine, Alador had gotten Amity to believe him. Amity’s crooked mongrel of a girlfriend made a big show of believing her. And of course everyone believed Luz the Human, no matter what.
Which meant everyone went into this session thinking she was a monster. She hadn’t even been allowed to say anything. She was represented by someone the Cabinet had appointed, someone who very clearly also thought she was a monster, and didn’t even try to make her look good.
(So what if all the things they were saying were true, that she had indeed knowingly supplied weaponry to Belos’s genocide, and used the threat of forced employment of her children to keep Alador complacent? She didn’t expect any of them to understand. They had no experience in business. That’s what all this was.)
The results were agreeable to everyone but her. They were grotesque in reality.
“The contested assets are as follows,” the draconic judge droned, high up on her pedestal where no one could reach her, no one could object. “Blight Industries, the manufacturing company, and its associated six hundred million snails.”
Her company, which she had founded, which she had run for years with almost no managerial help from Alador or anyone else.
“The house at 13 Venison Crescent, colloquially known as Blight Manor.”
Her house, which her family had lived in for two hundred years.
“And finally, referential guardianship of Edric, Emira and Amity Blight until adulthood.”
Her children, whom Alador barely knew, and had little to no hand in raising.
“Before the redistribution is read and established, are there any comments either party wishes to have on record?”
Oh, there was a lot she could say.
But a Blight must always maintain her composure.
She said simply, “Oh, just read the thing.”
The judge turned to Alador, who looked surprised, but said nothing.
“Please, proceed.”
The record of contested assets disappeared in a flash of fire, replaced by a new, much shorter document.
“Well,” said the judge, “this isn’t too complicated.”
Not a good sign.
“Edric, Emira, and Amity Blight are now under sole guardianship of Alador Blight until adulthood.”
Across the room, Amity let out a sigh of relief.
Fine. She could live without them.
“The house at 13 Venison Crescent and all belongings therein are now solely property of Alador Blight. No chance for appeal.”
There was a thimble of rage at that. (Though, if the whispering on Alador’s side of the room was any indicator, he’d have this amended. He wouldn’t keep everything.)
Still, the house wasn’t the real prize.
“Finally, Blight Industries and the associated six hundred million snails are now solely the property of Alador Blight.”
No.
No, this couldn’t be it. She had worked too hard, clawed too hard, for it all to end like this. She hadn’t spent months playing dolls with a god-child, she hadn’t spent decades appeasing the Emperor, she hadn’t married Alador of all people just to lose everything to him, to have him destroy everything.
She was going to kill that human brat. This was all her fault.
She saw fit to leave the room before anyone else. She’d heard enough. She was done.
Even Elijah, who promised to fix it, was a no-show.
​
“He’s not at home,” came the voice from the other end of the crow-line. “I don’t know where he is.”
“He was supposed to fix this,” Odalia snapped. “He was my only chance.”
“My father’s a busy man. So am I. Best of luck.”
“But-”
The crow took off before she could say any more, and darted past a sparse plume of red hair. Odalia froze.
“What are you still doing here?”
Lilith Clawthorne shrugged. “Who was that you were talking to?”
“Business partner.”
The corner of Lilith’s mouth quirked up. She found that funny. “What sort of business is it now?”
“None of yours, Clawthorne.”
Lilith nodded curtly. “Good luck.”
She turned to leave. But then apparently thought better of it.
“For the record,” she mused, “You still got more than you deserve.”
Then she walked away. As if she, Head Witch of the Emperor’s Coven, weren’t a thousand times more culpable. Where was her trial? Why did she get to keep everything?
Odalia would’ve punched the wall, in lieu of anything else. But she was still a Blight. She still had composure to maintain.
Even if she was the only one around to see it.
​
The various services provided at the Night Market were quite often beneath Odalia, Elijah knew.
Usually, she could’ve gotten out of whatever scrape she found herself in, relying on only her well-established fortune, her husband’s genius, and her own wit.
Now she only had one of those things.
Her fortunes were gutted. Alador, the sympathetic, addled troll that he was, had graciously allowed Odalia to keep the antique family crystal ball (he’d already built a new one) and a few other odds and ends from around the house she was no longer welcome in.
Elijah supposed she’d pawn it all off for some meager additions to her ancestral funds.
She still had sole access to said ancestral funds, which amounted to about… three million snails. Which, with her normal spending habits, was almost nothing. She wouldn’t last a month.
Unfortunately, it was just enough to cover Rhiannon Fyr’s usual rate, which was why Elijah was grateful to have gotten to her first.
He knew where Odalia would go to meet with her. It would’ve been suspicious if he had made her change the locale, no matter how… inconvenient this warehouse was for a killing.
(At least the nearby police station was a hospital now. That made things a bit less exposed.)
He waited on the upper grates, out of sight from the floor. Rhiannon was in the rafters, dramatic as she was.
Odalia came through the front door. Like an idiot.
“I know you’re there, Rhiannon. I don’t have time for the theatrics.”
Rhiannon looked at Elijah, who nodded. She dropped down to the floor, with her usual silent flair.
“I heard about the hearing,” she droned, as she emerged from a shadowed corner. “I can guess why you wanted to meet.”
“It’s not Alador,” Odalia said immediately. “If he died, there’s no way everything would just… revert back to me. Maybe the Manor. Less likely, guardianship of my children. But the company would be irretrievable. No, there’ll be no more contracts or abomatons no matter what. Blight Industries is finished. Killing Alador is pointless.”
At least she has the foresight to know that. It was more than Elijah expected of her.
Rhiannon raised an eyebrow. “What’s this about, then?”
“Someone else is to blame here. I’ll be damned if I let Alador have every victory.”
Elijah thought for a moment what that could mean. And then he stole down the stairs to ground level.
“I want you to kill Amity’s crooked human girlfriend,” Odalia sneered. “This is all her fault.”
“Well. I can’t allow that to happen.”
Elijah had situated himself behind her (and was quite out of breath in doing so, but he took great care not to show it).
Odalia was shaking as she turned to face him.
“...What are you doing here? What happened today? You were supposed to-”
“I was supposed to do nothing. I said I’d ensure your addled troll of an ex-husband got what he deserved. And now he has it.”
Odalia’s eyes widened in horror.
“I said you’d be safe in my home, and you were. But we’re no longer in my home.”
He nodded towards Rhiannon, and Rhiannon approached, twisting her whip into a knot.
“I also said I’d make everything right. And that is why I’m here.”
Rhiannon threw the noose around Odalia’s neck and pulled it taut. Odalia didn’t have time to react. Or to breathe.
She looked right at him as she fell to her knees. And he saw right into her. She was uncharacteristically pathetic.
It fit her.
“You just sat there, playing the victim. Odalia Blight. Commerce queen. Ruthless businesswitch of acclaim.”
He knelt down to look her in the eye.
“And yet somehow the worst liar I have ever met.”
“You can’t do this,” Odalia choked desperately. “You’re Healing Coven. You took an oath!”
Elijah grimaced. “Yes, I know. That’s why I hired an assassin.”
Behind her, Rhiannon chuckled, and tightened the noose.
“Believe me,” Elijah continued, “few things in this world would have brought me more joy than to do this myself.”
Odalia couldn’t speak. She could only let out an airless squeak, a strangled whine.
Elijah drew immense satisfaction from that.
“I didn’t get to watch Belos die,” he mourned, standing up and pacing. “I didn’t get to watch that hag Cutburn scream bloody murder when they put her up in her cage. Both times, I was with my children.”
Odalia’s face went white.
“But, speaking as a father, I have to say, this might actually be better.”
Then purple.
“It feels like… healing the world, a bit. An aggressive but surely effective and arguably necessary treatment of malignancy, on behalf of good parents everywhere. I do hold that Alador is an addled, distracted troll, and no amount of repentance will ever make him a good father.”
Odalia desperately grabbed for her pendant, her final defense. Elijah snapped it off her neck.
“But you? You are a disease. And in this way, I am the Titan’s antibody. That is what my Healing Coven will represent. A safeguard against malignancy in all its forms.”
Odalia crumpled to the ground. Elijah straightened himself, not bothering to kneel down to her level again.
“You, old friend, will make an excellent start.”
Rhiannon pulled a little harder. There was a sickening crack, and then Odalia was still.
Elijah almost smiled, despite himself. He dropped Odalia’s crystal pendant next to her head and crushed it under his foot.
Rhiannon carefully removed her whip and untied it. “What do you want done with her?”
“Throw her in the boiling sea,” Elijah muttered noncommittally. “Filth is best disposed of in the ocean.”
“You don’t want her for your boy’s collection?”
“Geoff has more than enough cadavers for his experiments, and I won’t risk that his peers might recognize this one.”
Rhiannon nodded. “Fair enough.”
She drew a circle in the air, and snapped her fingers. The hardwood of the warehouse curved and reassembled itself, and the limp form of Odalia Blight was perfectly mummified. Rhiannon hoisted it effortlessly over her shoulder.
“Pleasure doing business with you.”
​
Amo. Amas. Ama. Amamos. Amáis. Aman.
This was supposed to be a healthy distraction. Recently, Luz the Human had been on Elijah’s mind quite earnestly, and he’d wanted to figure out the etymology of her last name.
(Her first name meant “light,” which felt rather appropriate. Also, the word for “man” sounded like “home,” “embarazada” meant “pregnant” and not “embarrassed,” and the word for “Wednesday” was one of those words that sounded marginally near to a swear. And despite all this, this human language, Spanish, was apparently one of the closest languages to theirs.)
No wonder the human realm’s so war-torn. If I had to keep track of a thousand languages, I’d go completely insane.
At least it was phonetically consistent. That was nice.
Though, apparently not enough of a distraction for having just killed someone.
“Trouble sleeping?”
Geoff ambled over to the couch, in his hand a guidebook of forbidden potions that apparently once belonged to Belos. (It had been a gift from Lilith.)
Elijah sighed. “Are you ever so bored you try to learn a new language?”
“It’s not the worst problem to have,” Geoff chuckled. “What’s on your mind?”
Elijah considered for a moment before responding.
“When you were born,” he said finally, “I reevaluated a lot of things.”
“You almost named me Phillip,” Geoff recalled. “Which is… kind of funny now.”
“ Ugh, don’t remind me.”
Geoff stopped laughing, but maintained a jovial expression.
“You were ill,” Elijah continued. “You almost died. You’d been alive for two days, and we almost lost you.”
Geoff nodded. “I know.”
“I’ve been thinking about immune systems. Antibodies. We live on the corpse of a god, and I can’t help but wonder.”
He turned to face his son, his expression slightly haunted.
“When’s the last time we had shale hail? Or a gorenado? Or even a plague?”
A lot had calmed down since Belos’s death, but little had slowed down. This was a tough question to answer.
But even the sky changed after the old tyrant died.
“You think Belos was some sort of disease? Not rhetorically or metaphorically or anything like that. Literally, a disease.”
“Not just him,” Elijah confirmed. “Kikimora. Cutburn. Snapdragon, Graye, Oz, Wrath. Though Wrath’s been oddly cooperative. And Odalia. Poor, wretched Odalia. Viruses, all of them. A plague of bloodlust. And… we live on the corpse of a god. Are we more than cells, to him?”
He turned back to face the window.
“The sky… what if the darkness was a symptom? One which we were convinced was normal.”
Even now, at nighttime, it was brighter than the day had been, even just a year ago.
“I was six when Belos took power. I remember what the sky was supposed to look like. And, well, the rain always boiled. Some of the rabble ate infants. It wasn’t all brilliance and sunshine, I know that. But the sky was beautiful when I was a child. And I just… convinced myself that the memory was nostalgia. Overromanticized.”
The sun was rising. Dark blue gave way to a crimson that matched the trees. Soon it would be a lively cyan.
“I looked up today, and the sky was that perfect shade of blue. I was younger than you, the last time, and today I saw it again. And I knew I wasn’t mad.”
Geoff nodded. “The world is healing.”
“Exactly.”
“And what does that make us? The antibodies?”
Elijah stood. He spared his wrist a glance, with its sigil that, recently, marked him for death.
It also marked him as a healer.
“That is a nice thought, isn’t it?”

​
Start and End: February 22, 2023 (11:00 - 19:00) JST
=============\\=============
[1] Final Chapter: "Starting Point of the Miracles Across the World" Chapter 3 - "Atla Hasith's Ark Occupation Battle"
Start: February 22, 2023

After successfully completing the "F.SCT Battle," the skies were supposed to have returned to normal.
However, the unexplainable energy that is a precursor to the "Sanctum of False Delusion" was observed again--?
Will the teacher really be able to stop this situation? ......

=============\\=============
[2] A-H.A Conquest Battle
Start and End: February 10, 2023 (11:00 - 17:00) JST
=============\\=============
[3] Total Assault: Hieronymus (Urban)
Start and End: March 1 - 8, 2023 Results: March 8, 2023 (4:00 - 23:59) JST
※Insane & Torment Difficulty: Attack Type - Explosion
Rank adjustments
= Plat: Rank 1 - Rank 15000 (Additional 5000 slots) = Gold: Rank 15001 - Rank 80000 (Additional 15000 slots) = Silver: Rank 80001 - Rank 180000 (Additional 40000 slots) = Bronze: Rank 180001 and below
=============\\=============
[4] Cafe
https://preview.redd.it/n8vx16z6dpja1.png?width=2128&format=png&auto=webp&s=b2e76464e76cbc4c99195212f7639c953a692f0d
※Furniture motion for the following students: Toki: Racing Game Machine Nagisa: Tea Party Table
-If Nagisa and Mika visit the Cafe at the same time, you can view both of them in their furniture motion at the same time.
=============\\=============
[5] 2x Drop Campaign
https://preview.redd.it/secjp8p7dpja1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=144a82de7d652e25f4af9c60154cde2ae22c5e67

02/22 - 03/01	Commissions
03/01 - 08	Schedule & Scrimmage
03/08 - 15	Bounty
03/13 - 19	Normal
03/19 - 22	Hard

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[6 Extra] Pick-up recruitment: "Where there's Toki there's victory" & "Where there's tea party there's hope"
[Limited] ★3: Toki (CV: Yui Ishikawa)
[Limited] ★3: Nagisa (CV: Saori Hayami)
*Toki & Nagisa will be NOT added to the standard recruitment pool after the event.
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[Manufacturing] - Saori Eleph added to crafting - Beachside Series, Beachside Cooling Fan, Chill & Cool Ice Cream Refrigerator, Beachside Fluffy Floaters added to furniture drops - Beachside cooling fan", "Chill & Cool ice cream refrigerator", and "Beachside fluffy floats" were added to the furniture drops from the "Beachside series" selection box and lottery box - Added "Abydos Classroom Series Lottery Box" and "Abydos Classroom Series Selection Box" to the Recipes section
[Shop] - Eleph (Other) and Bounty Shop reset - Various kinds of "Reinforced Beads" were added to "Normal Item Shop" - Hanako and Koharu eleph added to Total Assault shop
[Others]
-Main story direction adjustment: In the main story Final. "The starting point of the miracle everywhere" Chapter 2 "F.SCT capture battle", some productions and backgrounds have been revised according to the development of the story.
- New armor: Resilience Armor - Drop rate of T2-T4 equipment blueprints was increased in some "mission" stages - Added "Chill & Cool Ice Cream Refrigerator" and "Beachside Fluffy Float" to the "Furniture Box (★3)" that can be obtained when purchasing the "Monthly Package for Manufacturing". - New Achievements - Some student graphics, enemy effects, and minor UI improvements - Other minor improvements and adjustments
[Fixes] ・ Battle skip function does not work properly on the strategy map ・ Main story "Conversation LOG" does not display ・ Student graphics are not displayed correctly in some main stories ・Formation screen, when organizing the same "helper" to another team, an unintended operation occurs. ・When Utaha (Cheerleader) gets "Fear", she behaves unintentionally ・Preset screen, "Special" student frame is displayed as "Striker" ・Some cases, results of student recruitment are not displayed correctly due to poor internet connection ・Accounts cannot receive friend request even if friend limit isn't reached ・In some cases "Glass window of the resort area" is not displayed properly. ・"Warm Christmas Fireplace" cannot be installed even when the installation space is sufficiently secured ・Typos, display problems, minor UI issues
​
banner source patch source

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Absolutely not me
Okay, guys, I have another theory. The wildest yet. One that will most probably 99% be scrapped afterwards. I am already preparing my face to be slapped as hard as BA storyteller is willing to.
But this kind of post is only possible right here, right now, before the current events really end. So if you are still with me, hear me out.
​
KEY
This post is somewhat related to my previous one: Eridu and the Key to the Blue Archives
This is not a must read, I am just saving some time to explain some of the names that will appear here.
Let's start with the basics.
​
Halos of Kivotos
What do we know about halos right now?

1. They are the symbol of Kivotos' mystic. Only the beings that are, or should be, unusual to us, normal human or "outsiders", have halos. The unusually strong girls have halos. The Sanctum Tower that noone knows how it operates has halo, the sky has halo probably because that is the whole Kivotos land's halo.
2. They show and identify every being. They are unique. If we pay attention, even NPCs, general mob-chans, have unique halos. And the design is always related to a core “attribute” of hers.
3. They are only visible when the being is conscious, or in operation. When a girl is asleep, the halo vanishes.
4. Destroying the halo effectively kills a student, or at least makes her permanently asleep. Hence the halo bomb. It targets specifically the halo.

What is implied to be truth by us players?

1. Halos grants superhuman strength and resistance to the girls. We are actually just associating them to the halo. We have no proof of direct correlation for now. Is it because they are special thus they have a halo, or are they special because the halo made them special?
2. The partially destroyed and dark halos are result of physical or mental trauma. Shirko Alter has the same halo but in peaces and greyed out. Justina members have halos with visible cracks.

It is very important to differentiate the two. We like to associate. We like to organize and classify. We see these cases of halo, and we put them together. But is it essencially truth given by the story?
Not always.
​
Just an average comet, don't worry about it.
Now let's talk about the newest events in JP.
We have an invasion of the "Colour".
At this point, we all know that this refers to Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space".
However just bear in mind that we should never outright claim that all references in game are exactly what we see outside of it.
I mean, yeah, at this point we know that Shiroko is related to Anubis, but she is no deity worshipped by Ancient Egyptians, right? The same goes to the different races, angels, demons, animals, youkais, etc. We can make some use of their properties, I think that should be what the game tries to. So...
These are quotes about the "Colour Out of Space":

It was "only by analogy that they called it a color at all", as it fell outside of the range of anything known in the visible spectrum.

Well, it really is not possible to make a 100% accurate reference in this case. How do we portray colour that we cannot comprehend? And then.

Over the following year, the problem spreads to the surrounding plants and animals, altering them in unusual ways. All of the vegetation on the farm begins to become grey and brittle.

Here lies a problem. Whatever is affected by the "Colour" becomes grey and brittle.
Brittle. Weak. Frail. Fragile.
This goes on the completely opposite direction of what we are seeing in the game.
Are the "corrupted" super-bosses not super strong? They are actually weak? What?
​
The gradual corruption of Kivotos
We see that in the PV, the Colour gradually corrupts Kivotos, expanding its influence, turning what is usually blue, red.
So red is the colour of corruption? According to colour theory, somehow, yes. But more importantly, it makes a greater impression to us, because we know the "former colour". "Normal" colour.
We are accustomed with the usual colour pallet of the game. Blue. Tranquility. Peace. This is the normal state of Kivotos. Filled with blue. So when it changes, we are alarmed.
The red here really sticks out. It is the very opposite of blue. It is aggression. It has very high intensity and contrast.
In other scenes in the same PV, the devs purposedly show us not only the current "abnormal" state of Kivotos, but also the "bad endings", and, guess what, it associates red with everything we don't want to happen.
The GSC president / Big Arona if full of blood, perhaps fatally wounded.
Aris/Key's scene is totally greyed out but leaves the red eyes and the machine's red untouched.
The scene where Mika freaks out is predominantly red.
Miyu cries and screams, the spark in her eyes disappear, leaving whole big red circles.
The scenes of Hina, Misaki, Saori, simply have blood.
The PV constantly hits this message in our head: "Red is bad".
This is furthered by the continuation of the first part of the PV, now the 3rd part. The current state of Kivotos. The warship flies over the red cloud, but you see hints of the blue sky.
Inside the alien ball it is all red. When you break the border, whether it be the ball, the reality, the dimension, it is blue. The cracks are blue. Aris's super railgun makes your screen all blue.
The return to the "normal" colour. To peace. To HOME.
This is why the PV does not give you any "despair" sentiment. It shows you that you will succeed and the red will be gone.
So, blue yes red no. Red means altered?
​
The red sky of Kivotos
Actually, when the whole sky is red, the students are unaffected. This goes against the description of the Colour. Everything it touches, it nears, will slowly go mad. Go red. But we don't see any gradual madness, corruption, reversal, and so on.
So, is it because the "Colour" did not "touch" the students, and so they are fine? Or is it because red is NOT the problem, but the representation, the "showing" that something is wrong?
Let's make it clearer.
The "bad endings" showed red, but they are not result of the Colour.
You know how are the ones affected by the Colour? The corrupted bosses show an alien starry colour. Shiroko Alter does not have any red.
Red belongs to Kivotos. It is already here.
But you know what changes and makes sense? The halo.
​
Halo difference before and after The Colour

Over the following year, the problem spreads to the surrounding plants and animals, altering them in unusual ways. All of the vegetation on the farm begins to become grey and brittle.

"Colour Out of Space" corrupts, makes it grey, makes it lose colour, makes it brittle.
Binah's halo loses colour. It also looks like it is more "sparce".
Hieronymus' halo loses colour. Also loses whatever he should have behind him.
HOD loses its halo.
Shiroko's halo turns grey, cracks.
They themselves are not weaker. But the halos seems like they have lost their brightness, their power in some way or another.
So, if the halo loses power, but you yourself turns stronger, does it not simply mean that the halo is not the provider of your strength?
​
Black Suit confronted by Shiroko Alter
In the new chapters, when Black Suit meets Shiroko Alter, he says somehing that roughly translates like this:

"Is that your other side, the Terror?"
"Everything has two sides, mystic and terror. Mystic can not be measured, but Terror is the essence, the origin."

If we take that what Black Suit says here is true, then Shiroko Alter is the original form Shiroko should be. The essence. We are told also that the inner part of Shiroko, she is referred as the "wof god".
So Shiroko is not turned into the representation of death.
She is the representation of death.
Shiroko's name, 砂狼シロコ, 砂狼 can be translated directly as "Sand Wolf". Guess what Anubis is? God of the dead in the land of sand?
Sound familiar? Representation?
Isn't the halo a representation of the being that possesses it?
So is it because of the corruption of the halo that transforms the property of its owner?
Or is it because the halo now represents the new property of its owner?
Or better yet, why is it that when the halo is being slowly destroyed, that the property of the owner emerges?
So could we say that...
The halo is actually a seal so to not expose the true entity of its owner?
​
Nameless Gods

Nameless Gods --- they are the land, the ocean, the catastrophes... the "Mystic" and the "Terror" that exists since the dawn of time -- perhaps we should call them so. They are the image/representation of the nature on this world.

In Eridu and the Key to the Blue Archives , I talked about the Nameless Priest.
KEY said this:

The Princess holds the Key in her hands, and prepared the Ark.
Granting the wish of the Nameless Priest, at this place a new "Sanctum" is constructed.
With his/its coming, all Mystic should be archived.

( In the original post I used Unnamed, but nameless is also valid translation here )
So if we take that Nameless Priest serves the Nameless Gods, who are the masters of Kivotos, of nature. And Shiroko is god.
Then does that mean that the girls in Kivotos are representation of some kind of power of the nature, of a god, and, as my previous theory......
​
Protocol ATRAHASIS
So, I'll have to make some adjustments.
The girls are from the world before the catastrophe. From the lost civilization that ended. However, they no longer represent the civilization as I theorized before. Because they were not on the Ark.
In Sumerian mythology, in the Epic of Atrahasis, the man survives, yes. But you know who else didn't die? The gods. The countless minor gods that Atrahasis offered to, whom humanity worked for before the Great Flood, and continue to serve in the new era. They were not on the Ark. But they are still present in the new world.
Since Shiroko is referred as god, Hoshino has similar nature so Black Suit wanted to experiment on her, and other students in Kivotos are similar in nature too... then these girls are the Nameless gods.
That leaves a question. Where is the man? Where is humanity?
KEY calls Atrahasis not as a man, but a project/protocol name.
Again.

The Princess holds the Key in her hands, and prepared the Ark.
Granting the wish of the Nameless Priest, at this place a new "Sanctum" is constructed.
With his/its coming, all Mystic should be archived.

​
Operation Nisir's Summit
In Sumerian mythology, Nisir is the name of the mountain where the ark of Atrahasis ended up.
The battle operation calls upon this name, this objective, this place. After the coming of the Colour, the Catastrophe - the Great Flood in the new era.
If we note that, in Sumerian mythology, the Great Flood had the mission to erradicate humanity, and gods were not affected, this explains why, under the red sky, under the Colour's influence, the girls were not going mad.
Because they were not the target of the Colour.
Kivotos will end. The girls? I'm not so sure.
But just like the minor gods did not want humanity to go extinct, the girls here want to preserve Kivotos as it is today.
Except Shiroko, who apparently the Colour decided to contact.
​
Shiroko Alter
Of course there are a lot of holes in this theory.
For example:

1. If halos hold back the original Terror of a student, why does the complete destruction of the halo kill her ? Shouldn't the Terror be liberated ?
2. The Colour acts upon beings that do not have halo too, like Perorodzilla.

I am still looking for a proper answer to these two questions.
I have thought of some ideas.
For example, in Sumerian mythology, En-lil casts the curse of death upon humanity. So humans are not immortal anymore.
So when the girls lose their halo, the sign of their divine, are they effectively cursed to death like everything in the new era, because they are not divine anymore ? They show their true nature, and inmediately perish ?
Or, in the Colour's view, did it curse upon the different beings, make them mad, remove what holds them back, represented by the alien colours of the bosses, but effectively only chose to damage Shiroko's halo?
​
GSC president, or Big Arona
TLDR time.

1. Blue good red bad. But red is already part of Kivotos.
2. Colour can corrupt halo.
3. Halo holds back the true nature of its wielder. When halo is corrupted, Terror comes out.
4. Terror is not caused or transformed into. It is how the girl should be.
5. Colour corrupted the bosses and Shiroko's halo, not Shiroko herself.
6. Girls really are divine beings in disguise.

​
Mysterious object of familiar dimensions
TRIVIA:
The construction that Kaiser PMC found has approximately 135 x 23 x 13 metres.
Guess what is the size of the Ark in the Bible? In Genesis, it says length 300 cubits, breadth 50 cubits, and height 30 cubits. Cubits is around 18 inches, which is around 0.45 metres.
0.45×300=135，0.45×50=22.5，0.45×30=13.5 .
It matches.
​
Same halo
TRIVIA NO. 2:
GSC president has the exact same halo as the title of the game.
I don't recall our current little Arona having this halo appear yet.

80 years ago, the Red Army launched Operation Iskra, which brought an end to Leningrad's hell

Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad, was the scene of one of the bloodiest and most tragic episodes of the Second World War.
Nazi Germany's siege of Russia’s former capital lasted 872 days, claiming the lives up to a million civilians and about half-a-million soldiers. Eighty years ago, in a colossal military effort, a breach was made in the blockade of the city: Operation Iskra opened a narrow, bare, exposed, but nevertheless operational land corridor from the ‘mainland.’
This was the first relatively successful attempt to break through the Nazi lines after four catastrophic failures over the previous years. The success of the operation was incredibly important, but the victory took such a toll and is associated with so much indescribable grief and destruction that, even in Russia, it is recalled very rarely.  

Superfluous city

According to Germany’s plan for the Eastern Front, the initial task of Army Group North was to capture Leningrad by mid-September 1941. This turned out to be impossible. The mobilization of the civilian population to build defensive lines to the south of the city (mostly women, as men were either employed in factories or went to the front) and the stubborn resistance put up by the Red Army prevented the Germans from taking it by storm. Not wanting to waste time and effort on the ‘doomed’ city, as it seemed at the time, Franz Halder, chief of staff of the Nazi ground forces, convinced Adolf Hitler to move tanks and mechanized units towards Moscow, and leave Leningrad under blockade.
It was assumed that, after a hungry and cold winter, its defenders would no longer have the strength to resist. The city would be captured and razed to the ground, and all the lands to the north of the Neva River, which flows through the city into the Baltic Sea, would be given to the Germans’ Finnish allies, who were securing their blockade sector. In encircling the city, the last railway line was cut near the Mga station on August 29, 1941, just two months and one week after the war began. September 8 saw the capture of Shlisselburg, 12km to the north on Lake Ladoga at the source of the Neva River. Supplies could potentially have been transported from here to Leningrad. The blockade of the northern capital is counted from this date.
Almost immediately after it was founded by Emperor Peter I in 1703, Saint Petersburg became Russia’s main commercial port and naval base. Wide avenues, cathedrals, the stunning beauty of the palaces of the imperial family and other nobles, as well as drawbridges over the wide Neva River, still remain a reminder of Russia’s grand history. But by the end of the 19th century, the city had also become the country’s main manufacturing centre, retaining its industrial significance even after the Bolsheviks, who came to power in 1918, moved the capital to Moscow. In addition, both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin recognized the city’s ideological importance, since it was here that the first socialist revolution had taken place, and the city itself had been renamed in honour of the leader of the global proletariat, Vladimir Lenin.
Thus, by wiping Leningrad off the face of the Earth, Hitler would be able to destroy large Soviet industrial and military plants (there were over 300 in the city), make the Baltic Sea safe for German shipping, capture a powerful merchant fleet, and move further towards Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, thus paralyzing supplies coming in via the Lend-Lease scheme, agreed with the US. Finally, and most importantly, Hitler was going to expel the ‘Asians’ from Europe and demoralize his communist opponent, depriving them of the cradle of their revolution.  

Hell on ice

Due to the Red Army’s disastrous start to the war and the general chaos in the country’s administration, Leningrad was absolutely unprepared for the siege. It was impossible to carry out a fully fledged evacuation of the city’s three million residents along just two railway lines in a relatively short time, and military enterprises were evacuated first.
Children were also sent away to protect them from bombing and artillery shelling. However, Leningrad’s youngest residents were not taken inland, but to suburbs and villages near the city, from which most of them soon returned.
No significant stocks of food had been created, and warehouses had been destroyed by German aircraft on September 8-10, when the blockade was established. By October, rations for residents who neither worked in factories nor fought in trenches had already been reduced to a catastrophic 125 grams of bread per day, and real famine set in as early as November. Cases of cannibalism were recorded and investigated in the city during the entire period of the siege, their number entering the hundreds. However, given the inhuman conditions in which millions of Leningraders found themselves, this is not as unconscionable as it may seem.
Of course, the situation was aggravated by the cold. The winter of 1941 turned out to be the chilliest in recorded history. The average daily temperature had already dropped to 0°C by October 11 and did not rise above freezing until April 7. Fuel reserves in the northern capital quickly ran out, and the electricity supply fell to 15% of the pre-war level. The central heating was turned off, and sewage and water supply systems froze. People put small cast-iron stoves in their apartments and heated them with everything they had, including furniture, flooring, wallpaper, and books.
The months of the first winter were the bleakest. People died from cold and exhaustion at home, at work, and on the streets. Many just sat down to rest and never got up again. In February, special teams removed over 1,000 bodies a day from the streets. According to official statistics presented at the Nuremberg trials, bombing and shelling killed a total of 17,000 people, while the famine planned by the Germans (their commanders were forbidden to accept refugees from the city), along with the cold, took the lives of another 632,000. Meanwhile, 332,000 soldiers perished. However, modern researchers tend to believe that these statistics are underestimated, partly due to the fact that Stalin probably didn’t want to take responsibility for a catastrophe of this magnitude or show weakness in front of former allies with whom the Cold War was already brewing.  

Survivors of genocide

Imagine: You wake up in the only warm room of a huge Leningrad apartment. All movement is difficult; your head is foggy due to hunger. You don’t need to get dressed, as you’ve slept in a padded jacket. You drink leftover water from a bucket taken from the well yesterday. You wrap yourself up more tightly and set off for your factory halfway across the city – public transport stopped working long ago. Supplementary nutrition is organized at the factory; it gives you a chance to survive. In the hallway, a smell hits your nose – a corpse lies under the stairs, for the third day – you don’t want to look. On the way to work, you meet people hauling sleds laden with the bodies of their relatives. They weave their way between snowdrifts and stationary trolleybuses so they can bury the dead. But none of this evokes any emotion anymore – during the endless months of this winter, about a million people have perished around you. You have already lost all hope – you live on autopilot and know this fate could soon befall you as well. Hundreds of thousands of people went through this and kept the trauma in their memory, although they preferred not to voice their recollection of all the horrors.
In terms of brutality, scale, and planning, the siege of Leningrad is quite comparable to the most infamous acts of genocide, including the ‘final solution of the Jewish question,’ as the Germans were fully aware of the consequences of their actions. And while, for a number of reasons, the Soviet leadership failed to draw attention to this, including in the international arena, in October of 2022, the Saint Petersburg City Court finally called a spade a spade and recognized the siege as genocide.

“Just recently, the blockade of Leningrad was also recognized as an act of genocide. It was high time to do it. By organizing the blockade, the Nazis purposefully sought to destroy the Leningraders – everyone from children to the elderly. This is also confirmed, as I have already said, by their own documents,” Vladimir Putin noted in November 2022.

Though Russia’s current president was born ten years after the Leningrad blockade was finally broken, his family was directly affected by this tragedy.
At the beginning of the blockade, the one-and-a-half-year-old son of Vladimir Putin’s mother, Maria Ivanovna, was taken away for evacuation, but he never made it out of the city. According to the official account, the child, Viktor, died of an illness. The only notification his mother received about this was a death certificate. As the Russian leader himself said, she only managed to survive due to the fact that her husband, Putin’s father, had been wounded at the front and received augmented rations, which he passed on to his wife during her daily visits to the hospital. This continued until he fainted from hunger, and the doctors, who understood what was happening, forbade further visits. After leaving the hospital on crutches with a shattered leg, he nursed his wife, who had stopped walking from weakness. Vladimir Spiridonovich had fought on the Neva Bridgehead.  

Attacking over comrades’ corpses

According to the memoirs of Georgy Zhukov, who repulsed an attempt to storm Leningrad in September-October 1941, Stalin initially considered the city’s situation nearly hopeless and was more focused on saving Moscow.
But the desperate resistance of the city’s defenders, the steadfast perseverance of its inhabitants, and later the heroism of the brigades that transported scarce food supplies to Leningrad in trucks and carts along the city’s sole lifeline – the ‘Road of Life’ established on the ice of Lake Ladoga – forced the Bolshevik leader to change his mind.
At that point, he began to demand that his military leaders break through the defence by any means and as soon as possible. The impatience of the Georgian, who had had the leadership of the Western Front shot just two months before, led to a number of hasty and ill-prepared attempted to break the blockade.
What was the German ‘wedge’ that penetrated to Lake Ladoga and cut Leningrad off from the rest of the country? It was a low-lying 15kmx15km area consisting mostly of woods and peat bogs, but in its very center was a hill on which the village of Sinyavino stood. To the west, the site was bounded by the wide (about 500 meters) Neva River, behind which the defending troops of the Leningrad Front were positioned. To the east was the Volkhov Front; to the north, the shores of Lake Ladoga; and to the south, the main part of Germany’s Army Group North.
During Stalin’s industrialization of the 1930s, a large condensing power plant had been built on the banks of the Neva River. Peat was dug from the marshes to provide fuel. Workers lived in several scattered villages connected by dirt roads and narrow-gauge railways. In the north, there was the ancient fortress city of Shlisselburg; in the south, deep behind the German lines, was a railway junction at the Mga station. The attempts to break the siege of Leningrad are conventionally called the Sinyavino Offensives.
The first Sinyavino operation began literally the day after the blockade was established, on September 9, 1941. It turned into two weeks of counter-fighting between Marshal Grigory Kulik’s newly formed 54th Army, consisting of recruits and retreating units moving from the east, and German forces trying to break through to the Svir River to meet Finnish troops. Had the Wehrmacht managed to accomplish this, there would have been no question of any ‘Road of Life’, and Leningrad would definitely not have survived the siege. From the points of view of Stalin, Chief of the General Staff Shaposhnikov, and Zhukov, who commanded the encircled Leningrad Front, the operation was an immediate failure. Enraged, Zhukov even decided to act independently and gave an order to force a crossing of the Neva from the west. In the vicinity of Shlisselburg, the landing forces were destroyed, but another attempt 12km to the south, on a narrow river bend, was more successful, and the Neva Bridgehead, where Putin’s father fought, was formed.
The Neva Bridgehead was constantly changing in size, with a width of up to 2km and a depth of about 800 meters. Although the relative narrowness of the river allowed boats to bring in reinforcements, albeit over icy water and under constant shelling (one in five made it), the bank itself was absolutely unsuitable for staging a further offensive. From the north, it was bounded by the huge power plant, which the Germans quickly turned into a fortress. From the east, it abutted two sand pits, through which it was impossible to launch an attack or conduct manoeuvres. The bridgehead was under constant fire from enemy artillery and machine guns. However, this did not stop the generals – they demanded frontal attacks and successes that they could report to Stalin.
Between September 19, 1941 and April 29, 1942, and September 26, 1942 and February 17, 1943, countless regiments and divisions cycled through the bridgehead, and over 50 hopeless attempts were made to advance towards Sinyavino and Mga to breach enemy lines. In 1941 alone, during the first and second Sinyavino operations, at least 68,000 people died on this small piece of land. It was nearly impossible to evacuate wounded soldiers, let alone corpses, across the river. When bodies were buried, they were buried right there, sometimes more than once, since incessant artillery fire (up to 50,000 shells, grenades, and aerial bombs per day) kept churning up the earth and exposing dead bodies. Winter temperatures made it impossible to dig pits in frozen ground, and frozen corpses were used instead of logs to reinforce trench walls or shelter roofs and make loopholes.

“All of that against the constant backdrop of our and German artillery fire, the unmistakable smell of mortar shell explosive, the repulsive sound of German ground-attack planes, the moans of the wounded, and the swearing of the living, who were cursing the Germans, the war, this wretched bridgehead, and sometimes our gunners if they were firing on our own positions,” according to Yuri Poresh, a soldier who survived the fighting.

It is estimated that the average combat utility of a soldier on the Neva Bridgehead was 52 hours, after which he was either killed or wounded, left facing the prospect of a challenging evacuation. Vladimir Putin senior, who had had his heel and ankle shattered by a grenade, had to swim across the river and was only able to make it to the right bank with the help of a comrade-in-arms.
The scale of suicidal losses suffered in this area was not properly recognized until after the war. Back then, thoughts were focused on saving Leningrad from the disastrous siege.  

The Birth of a Traitor

Fighting at the Sinyavino wedge was no walk in the park for the Germans either. They had to repel countless waves of Soviet attacks from two opposite directions. Continuous artillery fire soon obliterated almost every tree in that spot, so all Wehrmacht soldiers could see from their fortified positions, especially from the Sinyavino heights, were swamps, which never froze even in winter, scarred by heavy artillery fire, laid with mines, and littered with the corpses of Red Army infantry soldiers with an occasional burnt tank here and there. Further south, at the entrance to the Demyansk Pocket, whose defence by the Germans was closely linked to the defence of the Sinyavino wedge, there was a handmade road sign which said, in German: “Welcome to hell.” The Germans must have been thinking similar thoughts about Sinyavino, which looked like something out of Hieronymus Bosch’s disturbing paintings.
After victory near Moscow, followed by a counteroffensive, Stalin demanded again that the siege be lifted, which led to the notorious Lyuban offensive operation that took place between January 7 and July 10, 1942. Its purpose was to cut off the whole of the Sinyavino wedge south of Mga and, by doing so, not only relieve the siege of Leningrad but also seize the strategic initiative in the north. Created specifically for this operation, the 2nd Shock Army succeeded in breaking through German defences. However, due to the lack of roads, adequate supplies, and sufficient reinforcements, as well as the incompetence of Mikhail Khozin, the commander of the Leningrad Front, it was forced to halt its advance before being gradually encircled and destroyed. On April 20, almost by accident, Andrey Vlasov, a hero of the Battle of Moscow and one of the generals Stalin respected the most, was put in charge of the 2nd Shock Army to relieve its ailing commander.
By then, the army was all but doomed. When the high command finally allowed the army to retreat, it was too late, as the encirclement had been completed. After giving his last orders, Vlasov attempted to escape on his own, as he had done near Kiev in the summer of 1941, but was captured and identified. He would go on to lead the collaborationist Russian Liberation Army and become the epitome of a traitor. A total of approximately 350,000 soldiers and officers perished in the disastrous operation.  

Last setbacks

A month later, in late August 1942, the Red Army began the 3rd Sinyavino operation in another attempt to lift the siege. This time, the Leningrad Front was in the hands of Leonid Govorov, a much more capable general and a meticulous artillery officer. The commander of the Volkhov Front was Kirill Meretskov, an experienced general who had fought in Spain and been tasked with penetrating the Mannerheim Line in the Winter War. Up against them was Georg Lindemann’s German 18th Army, which included, among other units, the 250th Blue Division of Spanish volunteers.
However, given the local landscape, the mission still looked nearly impossible to accomplish.

“Soldiers had to build fences out of wood and dirt instead of digging trenches for their fighting positions and living quarters. Instead of foxholes, they piled earth to build open platforms, laid log roads for many kilometres, and constructed wooden platforms for artillery guns and mortars… The vast peat bogs stretching from the banks of Lake Ladoga all the way to Sinyavino and, south of Sinyavino, the dense woods with large swamps, almost impenetrable even for the infantry, were severely limiting the troops’ maneuverability and created more advantages for the defending side,” Meretskov later wrote.

The new attempt, which had been planned much more thoroughly, called for several waves of advancing troops supported by heavy artillery fire and flame tanks to destroy enemy fortifications. The operation could have been a success but, in August, the Germans were reinforced by the 11th Army, which had emerged victorious from the bloody Battle of Sevastopol. It was led by Erich von Manstein, one of Hitler’s top generals.
Von Manstein was initially expected to replicate his Crimean success in Leningrad. However, as the situation near Sinyavino was beginning to look increasingly dire, the German leadership told him to check the Russian offensive, which he did. It looked like another setback for the Red Army, which lost over 100,000 people, 40,000 of whom were irrecoverable casualties, yet it succeeded in averting the Wehrmacht’s attack on Leningrad and weakened the 11th Army so that later, when it was sent to Stalingrad, it failed to break the encirclement around Paulus’ doomed 6th Army.  

The spark that burned through armour

The 3rd Sinyavino operation allowed Govorov and Meretskov to gain a better understanding of the terrain and enemy capabilities. Stalin suggested that the next operation should be codenamed Iskra, or “Spark” (the idea being that it would finally set the siege ablaze). What set the fifth attempt at lifting the siege apart from the previous efforts was the meticulous planning that went into it and the special training the troops received.
For example, soldiers practiced crossing the Neva at spots inside the city where the enemy could not observe them. Artillery fire was supposed to take out all of the enemy’s firing positions on the left bank. To achieve that, one of the soldiers, who was a painter before the war, came to the frontlines several nights in a row and carefully examined the German defences before returning to the headquarters and depicting everything he had seen and committed to memory on a canvas four meters wide. The picture was then used for reference by artillery officers.
Logs held together by metal spikes were initially intended to help medium and heavy tanks to traverse the river. After the first two tanks sank during practice, it became clear that the wooden “rails” had to be given about 24 hours to become stuck to the ice before they could be used. Figuring out such nuances, combined with the surprise factor, was instrumental in ensuring the success of the operation.
Attacking from the west along the southern bank of Lake Ladoga was the 67th Army under the command of Mikhail Dukhanov, who began his military service before the revolution as a pontonier. Moving from the east was the unfortunate 2nd Shock Army, now put together for a third time, led by Vladimir Romanovsky. It numbered 164,000 men and had received a significant boost in terms of armour and artillery. Just two months prior, only 4,600 troops remained after defeat in the 3rd Sinyavino operation. It was in this army’s sector that the Germans’ defences were exceptionally formidable. They built several lines of fighting positions linked by pairs of walls made of earth and wood with water poured over them to make them icy. There was a total of over 400 emplacements for artillery and machine guns complete with minefields in front of and between them.
Ivan Fedyuninsky, deputy commander of the Volkhov Front, who was made responsible for the overall coordination of Operation Iskra, had 302,000 men under his command, five times the size of the German troops at Sinyavino. The first stage called for creating a land connection to Leningrad, the second phase was aimed at capturing Mga, a vital communications node, to establish a railway link with Russia’s central regions.  

Breakthrough at last

The operation was initially planned for early December. However, since the Neva was slow to freeze due to a relatively mild winter, the offensive was postponed by a month. On January 12, 1943, after an aerial bombing attack at dawn and two hours of artillery barrage, the two fronts began advancing towards each other through a 12km-wide corridor. Significant headway was made in the west, where the blow, contrary to the Germans’ expectations, was delivered not at, but to the north of, the Neva Bridgehead. The advancing troops secured a position on the left bank of the Neva measuring 6km by 3km on the very first day.
Achievements in the east were more modest. Over the next four days, the advance slowed and turned into trench warfare. The Red Army stormed German fortifications in the workers’ villages as the Wehrmacht sent in reinforcements. Those days saw the first deployment of the Tiger. One of those heavy tanks, which were still a rarity, was captured and carefully studied, which allowed Soviet and Allied armoured soldiers to identify its vulnerabilities and learn how to deal with it effectively.
At last, on the morning of January 18, advance units of the two fronts met south of Workers’ Village No. 5, located on the railway line connecting Sinyavino and Schlisselburg, repelled a German counterattack, and broke into the fortified village itself by midday. Realizing the urgency of the situation, the German command ordered the Schlisselburg garrison to leave, with about 8,000 soldiers and officers successfully escaping from the encirclement. By January 20, a land corridor about 10km wide running south of Lake Ladoga had been cleared of enemy forces, which dug in at the Sinyavino Heights. Further attempts, which lasted until April, to dislodge them were just as bloody as they were futile, meaning Operation Iskra failed to reach its second objective. The Germans left Sinyavino a year later, in January 1944, as part of their widescale retreat.
That did not matter much to the survivors in Leningrad so long as the horrible siege was over at last. The construction of a railroad running through the corridor – which had to be constructed in clear view of Sinyavino and could be reached by German artillery fire – began immediately on January 18. It took just 17 days to build a 33km stretch working only after nightfall in freezing temperatures, upon which the Road of Victory was used to deliver supplies to Leningrad and evacuate survivors. Russia’s northern capital and the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution was saved.
Credits : Anatoliy Brusnikin - A Russian historian and journalist