#yuder

Never mind the fact that from the three of them, he's the one with the most exposition so far into the story, where we even have one person in the cast who knew him personally. But finding out more about Luma adds depth not only to who he was as a mage and as a person, but to what his place is in the narrative and plot, and what he represents or means to our main characters.

So far into the latest chapters, Yuder and Kishiar's current conjecture is that Luma possibly could have possessed the man that Yuder knew as his grandfather, using a spell that Enon says could have been possible if it were Luma to have done it. This new plot point made me think back to many things about Luma that connected him to Yuder, both in their parallels to each other to who they meant to one another.

In the early parts of the story, Yuder doesn't have any interest in magic, nor does he fully understand how it works and could only understand it in terms he knows, usually through the eyes of an Awakener. He's basically as separate from mages or magic as a whole in that regard. But when the west monster subjugation arc came around, it basically teased us the idea that Yuder could have possibly been a mage. Of course, we would later forget about this part when shit started going down, but we would eventually come back to this.

This small yet important detail was not only foreshadowing to Yuder's grandfather's true identity and the reasoning for his isolation from the outside, but it is also a thread the narrative gave to us that points toward a connection to Luma.

Because Luma's name and influence appears sporadically across Turning, it's suspect why he keeps popping up. There's the magic armored knight within the Imperial Palace and the enchanted conch from Nelarn, just to name a few. Hell, even the sword slash by the first Emperor mentioned Luma as having had direct involvement for that slash being there (First Emperor/Luma and Kishiar/Yuder parallels go crazy but that's not what we're here for lol).

He's certainly important as a historical figure who was the progenitor of magic and was a legendary archmage, but if we're gonna be mentioning people like him, surely the first Emperor would have as many mentions to his name as much as Luma in Turning. But no, that isn't the case, and Luma has more stakes in the current story than in the past events. It's why he's being brought up quite frequently, because he has a role to play here, and it all starts with Yuder.

In terms of story roles, the two of them are the opposite, but in personality or conviction, they are the same. Yuder is the hardened Commander of the Arcane Legion/Cavalry who died trying to save a dying world only to find himself travelled back in time. Luma doesn't share this similarity with Yuder, but he does so with Kishiar, in which he's the one who would go on to bear the burden of knowing and caring about a person who experienced a grim future that would not come to pass. They contrast in their roles in the story, but personality-wise or at least some of their traits are quite similar. They are single-minded in their own pursuits; Yuder when it came to his personal training and growing his strength, and Luma furthering his own magic knowledge.

Hell, they even have rather unrealistic goals that involve the person they deeply care about; Yuder with saving White Gloves/TL1 Kishiar from the beyond the cracks, and Luma with reviving or bringing back the first Emperor.

With all that said, where am I going with this?

I highlighted my primary thoughts concerning the connection between Luma and Yuder, all to speculate on what this could mean for future story events/chapters. Now that the next major (I only say major because so far, the chapters are going on a bit of a detour for a Yuder vs Nathan duel + grave violation of a rotten Empress Dowager) point in the story will take Yuder and Kishiar to Nelarn for Ejain's coronation, we're not gonna get much info on Luma except maybe concerning the magic conch, but we might get hints.

There's still holes to Yuder and Kishiar's understanding of Luma's possession of Yuder's grandfather, not to mention Luma's end goal here. In so far, from the guesses our two mcs made, Luma did he what he did to protect and nurture Yuder as the one to save the world from a future calamity.

But if this was the case, then how exactly would he have known that something terrible was gonna happen in the future? Did he also know for sure that Yuder would become someone like the first Emperor, a person who travelled back in the past through time?

All in all, it all boils down to what exactly Luma had been up to after he left the Empire. We know he travelled down south, but that's where the trail goes cold. Whatever Luma was doing to honor the first Emperor's dying wish seemed to have worked, in some shape or form. We don't even know if the Luma who was Yuder's grandfather was fully Luma or just the last vestiges of the man or something.

My current brainchild theory is that Luma's spell broke through the laws of space-time, as he's not only seemingly able to travel to the future via mages who received the Archmage's Blessing, but also appeared to have known that Yuder would travel back in time just like the first Emperor or knew that the future would experience many tragedies.