Numbness deep within weary bone.
Chill harder than cruel stone.
The snow wears a nightmares smile,
and beckons me to stay a while.
I lay my head upon its soft embrace,
and in it's glow, I see your face.
This is part of Warrens series and directly follows Tending. The story we follow is a web of fine silver too thin to see. So we must test the air and see which way the wind moves around it. And so sometimes the only way forward is to go back, to pick far away points in the sky and follow them however unremarkable they seem. Here and now, will discuss the nature of Grams and walking nightmares.
Recall that a gram requires sympathy to make, an art some speculate Lanre has learned. It's a useful tool to have if your adversary has wings rings of power, which Lanre/Haliax's foes, the Amyr, likely do. Furthermore, we're told all roads end in death but one. And given Taborlin and Lanre both have escaped from a prison no man has before, it's plausible some of Taborlin's story are about Lanre. In which case we have narrative precedence that Haliax might have a gram:
It was black as a winter night and cold as ice to touch, but so long as it was round his neck, Taborlin would be safe from the harm of evil things. Demons and such.” ~NOTW:185
The amulet bears a striking resemblance to Kvothe's chilly antagonist. Cinder has a quicksilver grace, eyes as black as starless night, and is a creature of winter's pale. Cinder is a tool in Haliax's hand, and the distance might only weaken the bound, not break it.
Neither the Lethani, nor truth is a straight road, and so we must make a three way binding and pull clues from the all over the story. Like a gram, ashes draw malicious substances to them, an act we see when it pulls the denner from Denna. Similarly, Cinder's eyes and sword absorb the light. We have now firmly established the what, but what we lack is the how. For that, we need to turn to our foremost fae expert, Bastas. He tells us that the fae would never call what they do magic, instead they speak of art, craft or shaping. But formally, they would call it glammmourie and grammarie. Auri says alchemy is art and between these narrow roads we see the wider truth. All roads lead to Tinue, all stories are one, and we're left to connect the third side of our triangle and in its center, we see a truth only Auri understands. That all magics can be bent in the same direction, and artificing is grammarie through another medium.
Art_ificing is the art of making a gram. _Gram_marie is the art of making something be more than it is. For example, a woman could become the most beautiful woman for everyone, like Felurian. The target of every man's desire. Similarly, metal mixed with blood, could become more you than you, a target for malfeaseance.
To construct a guilder (a gram), giller needs to put themselves (or another's) substance into the metals. Blood, bone, spit, skin, hair, and urine are used, the same ingredients as for a simulacra. Only Grams are metal mixed with coal due to absorption properties. Both are used as a way to direct sympathy, towards or away. Everything has its inverse, and so if the guilder is more than metal it's also less than its creator. Cinder is Rhinta, shaped to be more and less than a man, the target of all our fears.
And for the final piece we have to travel underground and join Auri as she makes her soap. She runs the ash through water to create lye, a predominate ingredient in soap. But if your getting tin foil tingles than your not crazy, at not yet at least. Auri's descriptions of the lye are uncannily similar to Cinder. Auri calls the lye cinderwash and says its wanton (lacks control), stately, and graceful. She even breaks homonym barrier and says it contains caustic lies (should be lye). Auri is truly powerful, her soap making is magic on a scale we can't fathom the repercussions of.
Your close now, the truth tingles in the back of your mind like butterfly wings. Bast outlines the door in broad strokes. It was right there, right at the start of everything, waiting for you to come back to it....
“That’s grammarie. Now imagine if someone could take a knife and make it be more of what a knife is. Make it into the best knife. Not just for them, but for anyone.” Bast picked up his own knife and closed it. “If they were really skilled, they could do it with something other than a knife. They could make a fire that was more of what a fire is. Hungrier. Hotter. Someone truly powerful could do even more. They could take a shadow …” He trailed off gently, leaving an open space in the empty air.
Like so much magic, if try to hard to understand, it falls apart. And so we must weave our story from the moon's light and not look to close. For in the shadows the beating heart of the mystery still lies. We dear not approach it directly, instead we must find the graceful way to move and hope it will come to us and let its De sidere.
Thanks go out to u/playtheboard for support, ideas and editing suggestions. To u/mattytangle and u/the_spurring_platty for their great theories.
