Wind

so in both books it is very rare for rjb to throw out bits of information that don't end up being vitally important later on. once you realize this it's pretty easy to spot them and often to figure out a big chunk of the mystery (i mean this as a compliment to his writing.... it is very satisfying if when, for example, you read ana mentioning twins in the start of the book it lodges in your mind and you look for ways it fits into the puzzle as you go until you have an ah hah moment...i love this sort of thing...it's great brain candy)

one such bit of information that got tossed at us in the first book has stuck with me and has not yet been fully unraveled. at the end of the second book i had a moment where i felt like I'd missed something connected to it (I read the books in under two days while exhausted from vaccines so it's quite possible). I have two questions for other readers. 1) did i miss something? and 2) given specific pieces of information is my theory sound and what theories do you have?

let's start with this bit from the tainted cup

fayazi talks about the vitality suffusions given to the conzulates here. later din describes them as "giant ageless beings"

(a side note here that both fayazi and gherlin imply in different ways that the empire is Up To Shit. worth keeping in mind)

this description lodged in my head next to another:

you probably see where I'm headed with this

here's another good one:

and indeed when we get to see one it does have a face and Din thinks it's trying to say something

then we have the Khanum, the ancient blessed race who had all the abilities of all the current augmented people combined and who all died out long ago. at the end of the second book it's heavily implied that Ana is an attempt to remake one of them. this was the passage that made me wonder if I'd missed something

we know that some (all?) of the grafts and alterations used in the empire come from the titans and it follows that the Khanum would have been heavily modified by them, though I can't find any direct mention of that beyond what is strongly implied in this passage. I'm mostly worried that I missed some mention of who and what the Khanum were (are? the emperor is theoretically still around) AND if there was a mention of the origin of the titans somewhere

because we now have a situation where the imperials entire society is built around the reagents they get out of titans. if the titans were to vanish, if they were to stop showing up, what would it do to the empire?

it's mentioned in passing that the titans are beyond ancient, older than the empire i believe. so it's unlikely that the empire created them...probably? but it now needs them to survive (the marrow is even more valuable in this light). i have a few theories based on all of this

1) the Khanum did not all die out the way that history claimed and in fact became new titans who supplemented the ranks of the original ones

2) the conzulates are turning into something like leviathans which is why they are killed eventually, but they may be a backup plan in case the titans stop showing up. what if they were allowed to keep growing? (this assumes that the titan components that are necessary to the empire are not viable until a complete transformation has occurred)

3) ana is compared to the aurors a good deal. the people who made the aurors have unlimited direct access to titan parts. presumably the aurors alterations are heavily from the titans. i imagine the empire is going to be super big mad about it if they made some kind of mini khanum elixir in the shroud. but aurors get apophenia if they use it too long. BUT if the empire was really doing some wild shit with titans and the khanum etc wouldn't the aurors who are working on the titan corpses and engineered to draw connections figure that out? and if they started ranting about the empire doing crazy shit might that not be classified as apophenia? Din is told specifically not to mention anything going on outside the shroud to them

(side note that if the altered imperials now have pieces of the powers of the Khanum and the Khanum were altered from titan parts/reagents that the empire itself is sort of a giant titan... each citizen important in their role as part of the larger organism. sen sez imperiya)

another lingering question i still have is why the titans keep showing up exactly where they do every year like clockwork. it's extremely bad for the people living near the sea but also damned convenient for the empire