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One that fires a very strange ammunition,” said Berenice. “Not a bolt, but a scrived plate. A small one. Your son was almost certainly shot with such a plate.” She tapped her right temple. “It buried itself in his skull, and then his mind was twinned. With the enemy. Two things made alike. The enemy scrived his body, his very being, and its thoughts became his. It saw what he saw, its mind became his mind, and it told him what to do—and he did it, because his will was no longer his own.”
In her head, she was just a year or two shy of thirty. But the face in the reflection, with its salt-and-pepper hair and wrinkled eyes and blooming age spots, was easily well north of fifty.
Like all Tevanni forces, it looked like a giant, rambling mess: there were no consistent colors, no banners, no formations of any kind, just an enormous, shambling throng of armed people staggering forward. It would have appeared slapdash at a distance—and Berenice knew many fallen generals had mistaken it for such—but she was aware that in an instant the hosts could snap into formations and begin reacting like a singular, liquid mass in response to all threats at once,
There was what Berenice and her compatriots thought of as conventional scriving, wherein one convinced everyday objects or materials to disobey reality by writing elaborate arguments upon them, arguments that called upon other arguments and definitions to make their case, all stored nearby in a lexicon.
But then there were the “deep commands,” which allowed one to make a sudden, abrupt, inexorable change to reality itself, an edit so swift and complete that the world never even knew it’d been changed. Yet the deep commands came with a price: human life.
overcame this obstacle by creating tools that distorted the transition from life to death. By investing a soul within a tool, like Clef—a life ripped from its body at the stroke of midnight and trapped within a weapon, or an instrument, or a device—they could capture a deep command within it and invoke that command again and again and again, with no limit.
Tevanne had realized that if you didn’t mind paying a fresh cost for each edit, you didn’t need to bother with capturing a command within a tool or a rig at all. You simply needed life in general: by stealing days, months, or years from a person, you could inflict a fresh command on reality whenever you pleased. This had its own constraints, of course. Each time you made an edit, you’d burn through your victim’s vitality like a flame through a cheap candle, aging or killing them instantly. But, of course, this didn’t matter if you had a whole populace to use as kindling.
Just as the deadlamps aged their slaves with every scriving, the little plate in Sancia’s head feasted upon her years, eating up her days, aging her far faster than normal.
One mind, thought Berenice, stretched across the face of the earth, allowing two distant people to path deeply . . . She shivered. Perhaps one day Greeter shall encompass the whole of the world.
the Internet and fb - more of shudder need than a shiver lol
They called themselves the People, blessed with the knowledge of how to perceive raw scrivings in the world. Their stones were stronger, their blades sharper, and they used this to build an empire that spanned more than three centuries—but sometimes they saw more than raw scrivings. Sometimes they glimpsed the deep commands, the instructions coded into reality to make all the world run as a clock. Yet they only witnessed this in the presence of death.”
“They saw,” said Crasedes. “They learned. And they made. But they made something new.”
