#cawlposting

He furrows his brow, a honed mind trying to parse the irrational into something which it can tackle.

He does not know, limited as he is by confines of his reality. All his mental prowess is wasted, trying to grasp something that is categorically beyond its reach: the wheel has turned.

Half a dozen generations of Tau can change during the time it takes Orikan the Diviner to have a proper meditation. And sure, it’s all “pathetic mortals” until you realize that, without the trademark imperial stagnancy, that is a lot of time to do something.

When Trazyn met Cawl on Cadia, the latter seemingly knew next to nothing about necron technology, and probably even necrons in general. But not much more than 20 years later - barely a discrete amount of time for immortals - we see Cawl hacking and manipulating necron tech on Pharos and slamming it with a C’tan shard.

Imagine going away for the weekend, and when you are back, the crows outside your house have learned to drive a fucking car. Probably yours. And will continue in that vein if you don’t do something about it very quickly and constantly. Because what for you is a distraction of a menial task, for them could be the purpose of their whole existence, at which they will come again, and again and again, never stopping, always dragging you down to their level of chaotic short-term existence.

Basically all three of them are very simple adventure stories in which at best half the page count is actually dedicated to Cawl and the central cast of characters around him. The plot is mostly about going to the Bad Place to get Important Thing. There is always a Space Marine.

'Not quite, lord-captain. Age is a factor here, but it is the other way around - I am actually considerably older than most magi you'd meet today.'

'That's the first time I hear of age making anyone more open-minded.'

'And you still haven't. The march of time has only nurtured in me a conservative streak, as it tends to do. But me and many of my generation - we are the children of the last CBR, brought up in what one might call a more... liberal era of our kind.'

'The last what? I am unfamiliar with this abbreviation.'

'Cawl-Based Renaissance, my lord. How to explain...' "

In "To Speak as One", when Qvo-87 is having sort of a solo adventure, he appears both smartass and prone to theatrics in his scheming against the inquisitor - a downright Belisarius Cawl in miniature. Whereas Qvo-89, upon his awakening, is much more like Friedisch Adum Silip Qvo we meet in Cawl's flashbacks - a somewhat timid, pious man, a "straight man" and an exasperated witness to Cawl's antics.

This, of course, can be explained as a result of each iteration getting closer to the original, with Qvo-89 being a particularly close copy, as Cawl smugly notes. But at the same time it does not seem like that much of a radical breakthrough - Cawl navigates their initial conversation like one he already had dozens of times, suggesting that most iterations of Qvo at least start out this way.

Which, to me, suggests two, not necessarily contradictory explanations:

First one is that, not originally having the entirety of Friedisch's mind to save, Cawl had to "fill in the blanks" with something - his own ideas of what his friend was like, perhaps? And wouldn't it have been nice if poor Friedisch, ever so serious, always stressed and sweating the unimportant details, could, over time, learn to relax and enjoy himself a little?

But second is that Cawl's reconstruction of him has nothing to do with this. Friedisch Adum Silip Qvo was actually always like that. A man who acted indecisive and skittish as an unappreciated low ranking adept at the bottom of a paranoid, schism-torn priesthood in the middle of an apocalyptic civil war, suddenly finds himself as essentially immortal right-hand man to a messianic genius at the head of one of the most powerful human institutions in the galaxy. Wonder if it's going to help him shed some self-confidence issues and express himself more freely?