Keep your hopes high and your expectations low

Even if it’s temporary because Vaelus and Hannan left and it wasn’t the original intent of the ritual, the Fae have been suffering because they didn’t have access to the magic of Faerie. This could give them YEARS more to sustain them until they do their own ritual, if they have to.

What do you mean. They did the producer rolls already?????????

And he got the 23. That’s why the first Act was so tenuous.

And none of the ingredients in my fridge go together in a coherent way. I have fish with Cajun seasoning, flour tortillas, coconut probiotic yogurt, cucumbers, and balsamic Parmesan.

So the current problem facing Aramán that Thjazi was obsessed with solving was the huge amount of dead souls filling the underworld and not moving on. For the last 4000 years of recorded history, the Shapers were in charge of bringing the dead through the Tenebral Reaches and into designated afterlives, using their personal preferred psychopomps — most of whom were celestials, but Tansul apparently decided to use living human sorcerers because he’s weird like that. (It’s also entirely possible that any of these afterlives are a myth and they were actually fodder for the gods power or something equally fucked up, but that’s not really been implied that strongly iirc.)

So 8 years ago, Thjazi attempted a ritual, and that ritual actually ended up closing the doors to Faerie and apparently included a bunch of undead trying to break into that realm. The prevailing theory was that it was a Tachonis plot, but it seems pretty clear now that Thjazi did it.

I assume he was trying to rip a hole in the Tenebral Reaches that pointed OUT and also NOT INTO THE MATERIAL PLANE, and he learned that if he didn’t anchor the other side of the hole as well then it could end up anywhere, like in Faerie. Faerie thinks it’s under attack from the material plane (technically true) and closes all of its doors. (It’s also possible that he was specifically trying to move ELF SOULS — they’re the smallest number because so few of them die, so they’re good for a trial run, they’re related to Faerie so it’s possible that they were unintentionally drawn there.) (OR, they were actually successful, Thaz moved all of the elves into Faerie intentionally, but Faerie thought it was an attack and shut their doors because actually Elves and the Fair Folk aren’t actually besties. So Thjazi created unintended consequences, and may not have actually known that he succeeded.)

I would journey to venture that this current try is specifically for moving ORC SOULS — he has repurposed the Pariah Blades AND Azgra’s Blood, and the play is ABOUT ORCISH HISTORY and IN AZGRA’S DITHYRAMB. HOWEVER, we know that the Orcish afterlife during the time of the Shapers fucking sucked, so I don’t believe he’s attempting to move them to that particular afterlife. I think he’s trying to literally build them a new afterlife, so their souls have an option besides “wander the Tenebral Reaches forever” or “Follow the Old Path”.

ALSO

I think Thjazi’s cosmology was wrong. I don’t think he was working from the full picture, or had found the right conclusions.

From what I can recall, and I haven’t rewatched episodes, The Sea of Lachris is older than the Shapers. I feel like Brennan emphasized that the spell recipe the Tachonis are going off of predates the Shapers time on Aramán, and that it’s written in Old Obradai transcribed phonetically in Dwarvish. Which means that before the Shapers existed, the Underworld HAD a geography, it HAD a sea and other physical locations. It WASN’T just a veil with vague gestures toward physicality, like it was during the Shapers’ reign.

SO, before the Shapers, the Underworld was full of all sorts of souls who existed in all sorts of places. During the time of the shapers, those souls were instead siphoned off into bespoke afterlives. They even used a common location where OTHER souls could request to join those afterlives. (I personally think they were necrophages — they “ate” the souls of the dead to retain and replenish the power they used in making and ruling them. Sylandri had to have the fastest and most efficient psychopomp out there because she was basically maintaining a one-out-one-in magic system, unlike the others who let their followers multiply as they chose.)

So without the bulk of these souls giving the Underworld shape and power and (after)life, the physicality of the space atrophied. It faded from living memory that the Tenebral Reaches were anything more than a waypoint with the Tachonis castle in them. Even the Druids, who retained knowledge of the Old Path, assume that all souls upon death must have passed quickly into reincarnation the same way that Shaped souls passed quickly into their afterlives, because the Underworld is obviously just a liminal space, not a PLACE with LOCATIONS AND PEOPLE.

So Thjazi, who knows that the number of souls is growing unsustainably and the Underworld can hardly hold them, thinks that the answer must be to create NEW, post-Underworld afterlives for souls to be drawn into. So he’s cutting holes in the walls of the realm and forging new paths for everyone to escape through. When instead, more souls SHOULD be staying in the Underworld and REFILLING it.

Metaphor: picture a sprinkler at the end of a hose. All of the little holes in the sprinkler are the afterlives of the Shapers, and the water/souls are pouring out of the holes. And then they cut off the sprinkler head, and now the water is pouring all over the yard and flooding the Garden and the driveway. Someone is trying to put a MASSIVE water balloon on the end of the hose, but it’s at the point where it’s still tiny and uninflated and it’s not fully secured on the hose so the water just keeps pouring out the sides. Thjazi keeps trying to cut holes in the balloon, and the Tachonis want the flooding to continue so they pull the edge of the rubber away from the hose nozzle. When actually, if you just LET THE BALLOON FILL and SECURED THE NECK TO THE NOZZLE then you’d get a good seal and the balloon would expand for a LONG LONG LONG time. And THEN, the Druids could come in and GENTLY AND INTENTIONALLY let some of the water out in controlled and convenient times into the storm drains/Old Path, which would make room for more souls/water in an equilibrium.