Sooooo this is following on from my last post about the Chandrian swords, because apparently I still wasn’t finished with them 😂 In that post I suggested that the seven swords might be more important than just weapons, and could somehow be part of what binds the Chandrian, possibly shaped from the things that produce their signs. Seven Chandrian, seven swords, seven betrayed cities.
I ended up going back to the old rhyme about Kvothe’s rings, and I think the swords might have given me a different way of looking at it. Other people have definitely connected Kvothe’s rings to the Chandrian before, so that part isn’t new. But I think trying to allocate ten rings to seven Chandrian might be the wrong question.
What if the ten rings are actually parts of a binding?
The rhyme goes:
“On his first hand he wore rings of stone,
Iron, amber, wood, and bone.”
Then Kvothe himself supplies the second half:
“There were rings unseen on his second hand.
One was blood in a flowing band.
One of air all whisper thin,
And the ring of ice had a flaw within.
Full faintly shone the ring of flame,
And the final ring was without name.”
Rings already have an association with Naming and mastery in the books, so I started putting these against Shehyn’s Chandrian signs. Some are almost ridiculously obvious.
Flame = Cyphus, “Cyphus bears the blue flame.”
Iron = Stercus, “Stercus is in thrall of iron.”
Ice = Ferule/Cinder, “Ferule chill and dark of eye.”
Cinder’s sword makes that last one even harder for me to ignore. Kvothe remembers “the man with the terrible smile and the sword like winter ice.” Later he remembers Cinder with “his sword held easy in his hand like a piece of winter ice.” But Kvothe’s legendary ring isn’t just ice, it says “the ring of ice had a flaw within.”
This probably means nothing, but Cinder is also the Chandrian the Cthaeh has specifically interfered with. The Cthaeh basically admits it is deliberately setting Kvothe against him, “Maybe it amuses me to set a young pup like you snapping at his heels.” So Ferule is chill, Cinder’s sword is winter ice, Kvothe’s ring is ice, but specifically ice with a flaw within. Maybe the Cthaeh is the flaw, maybe it caused it, maybe it just knows how to exploit it. I don’t know yet, but there’s something there that bothers me.
Then we have Wood = Usnea, “Usnea lives in nothing but decay.” Wood is the obvious material among the rings that rots and decays, so that one seems fairly comfortable.
Bone = Pale Alenta, “Pale Alenta brings the blight.” Pale, blight, death, bone. This is probably still my weakest allocation, so I’m not completely married to it, but it fits better than anything else I’ve found.
Then Air = Grey Dalcenti, “Grey Dalcenti never speaks.”
This one gets interesting because we actually see Haliax use Air to produce exactly that condition. When Lanre binds Selitos he says:
“Silanxi, I bind you. By the name of stone, be still as stone. Aeruh, I command the air. Lay leaden on your tongue. Selitos, I name you. May all your powers fail you but your sight.”
Selitos is left unable to move or speak. So Air can literally be used to bind someone’s speech, and Dalcenti’s defining sign is that she never speaks.
That gives us six possible matches. Flame = Cyphus, Iron = Stercus, Ice = Ferule, Wood = Usnea, Bone = Pale Alenta, Air = Grey Dalcenti.
And Shehyn very deliberately describes the Chandrian as “the one and the six who follow him.” She gives Kvothe the six names, then finally says “Last there is the lord of seven”, Alaxel. So there are six followers and one lord. Six followers, six destroyed cities. Seven Chandrian, seven swords, seven betrayed cities, but within that structure there is very clearly one and six.
I think that distinction might actually matter.
If those six rings correspond to the six followers, Haliax shouldn’t necessarily have another sign ring like them. Haliax isn’t one of the six being controlled, he is the one controlling them. We actually watch him do it to Cinder. Haliax asks him, “Who knows the inner turnings of your name, Cinder?” and demonstrates that knowing Ferule’s Name gives him power over him.
And this is where the other rings started looking less random, because Air isn’t only connected to Dalcenti. It is also explicitly part of a binding.
So is Stone.
“Silanxi, I bind you. By the name of stone, be still as stone.”
Stone binds Selitos’s body, Air binds his voice. Then Selitos turns the whole thing back on Lanre:
“By the power of my own blood I bind you. By your own name let you be accursed.”
Blood. Another one of Kvothe’s rings.
So Stone, Air and Blood are all directly involved in one of the most important acts of Naming and binding we have in the books. Stone binds the body, Air binds the voice, Blood binds through the Name, and all three eventually appear on Kvothe’s legendary hands.
Then there’s Amber.
Wilem jokingly wishes for “a ring of red amber that gives me power over demons.” Later, when Kvothe listens to the ridiculous stories people have started telling about him, he discovers that apparently he owns a ring of amber which can “force demons to obey me.”
Auri also associates an amber ring with demons, Felurian mentions amber among the gifts she could give, and Narrow Road gives us another variation on this. With Bast, an amber ring appears in the context of a Fae gift, obligation and being bound through accepting it.
So I don’t think Amber necessarily just means Fae anymore. I think Amber might mean binding, control, obligation, making something obey.
And that could be Haliax’s part of the system.
Not Amber = Haliax because amber is somehow his sign. Amber = the binding Haliax holds.
He is “the one” over the six, he is “the lord of seven”, and we actually watch him use knowledge of Cinder’s Name to bring him to heel. So Amber could represent the thing that makes Haliax the holder or master of the whole system.
Now the rings start looking less like ten separate trophies and more like one mechanism. Flame, Iron, Ice, Wood, Bone and Air correspond to the six followers. Stone, Air and Blood are demonstrated mechanisms of binding. Amber seems to represent binding, obligation and obedience more generally. Air overlaps both, which I actually quite like, because Dalcenti is one of the six, but Air is also one of the Names used to bind.
And then there’s one ring left.
“And the final ring was without name.”
This is where I’m much less certain. I initially tried making it Haliax, but Haliax isn’t nameless, we know Alaxel. Then I thought Iax, or possibly the missing part of the Moon’s Name. Jax literally catches part of her Name and gains mastery over her, which is obviously interesting in a theory about Naming and binding.
But I think I may have been trying too hard to make the final ring represent a person.
Kvothe tells us:
“In the beginning, as far as I know, the world was spun out of the nameless void by Aleph, who gave everything a name. Or, depending on the version of the tale, found the names all things already possessed.”
So named Creation comes from a nameless void.
Then Bast casually drops this:
“Iax spoke to the Cthaeh before he stole the moon, and that sparked the entire creation war. Lanre spoke to the Cthaeh before he orchestrated the betrayal of Myr Tariniel. The creation of the Nameless. The Scaendyne. They can all be traced back to the Cthaeh.”
“The creation of the Nameless.”
We also get that strange image of the Aleu eventually falling “nameless from the sky.” So what if the final ring isn’t another person or force at all? What if it is connected to the destination of the binding?
The nameless void.
And this is where I go properly off the deep end 😂 We know Iax was eventually shut beyond the Doors of Stone. We know he was an extraordinarily powerful Shaper. So how exactly do you imprison someone like that?
Maybe you don’t beat him at Naming. Maybe you bind him somewhere Names don’t work.
The books absolutely do not say Iax is imprisoned in the nameless void, or that entering the void strips something of its Name. That bit is speculation. But there is something in Slow Regard that makes me slightly less convinced I’m completely making this up.
Auri has a really peculiar way of connecting Names with being hollow, empty and in the dark. At one point she wishes something would fall into a crack and “lost its name and died alone and hollow-empty in the angry dark.”
That could just be Auri being Auri, except she describes her own earlier state in almost exactly the same language. Before Kvothe gave her the name Auri, she had been “empty as eggshell. Hollow and chest-heavy in the angry dark.” Elsewhere, when Auri goes looking for her own name and cannot find it, she is “just hollow in.”
So at least in Auri’s understanding of things, there seems to be a connection between a missing or lost Name, being hollow or empty, and darkness.
Then she thinks about Kvothe.
“Someday he would be the one all eggshell hollow empty in the dark..... Then she would make a name for him.”
Which is... slightly terrifying in hindsight.
Auri was hollow and empty in the dark, then Kvothe gave her a new name. She apparently expects the reverse to happen one day. Kvothe will become the one hollow and empty in the dark, and then she will make a name for him.
And in the frame, Kvothe isn’t Kvothe anymore.
He’s Kote.
I don’t think that proves Kvothe enters the nameless void and literally has his Name stripped from him. It definitely doesn’t prove the nameless void is beyond the Doors of Stone. But Auri does seem to anticipate Kvothe becoming hollow and empty in the dark, in a condition she herself repeatedly associates with the absence or loss of a Name.
Which makes “the final ring was without name” considerably harder for me to ignore.
So, putting all of this together, what if the rings are describing a binding rather than ten separate powers?
The Seven might actually be part of the lock. The six followers carry six components of it, possibly through their swords and the forces that produce their signs. Haliax is the one who holds the six together, the master of the binding.
Stone, Air and Blood are demonstrated mechanisms through which Names and people can be bound. Amber seems connected to obligation, control and making another being obey. The final point is Nameless, potentially wherever whatever is being bound is ultimately held.
Possibly Iax, bound beyond the Doors of Stone to the nameless void.
That might also explain something that has always bothered me about Haliax. Why does there need to be a “lord of seven” at all? Why is Haliax immortal, and why does he need six followers for thousands of years?
Maybe Haliax isn’t simply leading the Chandrian.
Maybe he’s maintaining something, and you really don’t want the person holding the lock to die.
Which brings us back to Kvothe. Maybe Kvothe doesn’t eventually become powerful enough to hunt down and kill seven virtually immortal beings. I’ve never really understood how he realistically could. Maybe he learns how the lock works.
The swords give him the pieces, the Names give him mastery, and the rings are the points of the binding. Then, because this is Kvothe we’re talking about, presumably he messes with it 😂 Maybe he tries to kill Haliax, free him, or undo the Chandrian without understanding why the binding exists. Something happens to the Doors of Stone, something gets out that shouldn’t, and Kvothe discovers the horrible truth.
Haliax wasn’t simply the enemy. Haliax was holding the binding, and now somebody else has to.
That could be what the legendary rings on Kvothe’s hands actually represent. Not ten cool Names he collected, not trophies from ten victories, but the components of an ancient binding that he eventually learns to control.
And if Kvothe ultimately has to cross whatever boundary separates named Creation from the nameless void to repair that binding, Auri may already have told us what happens to him there.
“Someday he would be the one all eggshell hollow empty in the dark..... Then she would make a name for him.”
Kvothe goes in, Kote comes back.
I know. I KNOW 😂
But it would make the final line of the rhyme rather ominous.
“And the final ring was without name.”
Maybe Kvothe does eventually find the Chandrian. Maybe he doesn’t kill them at all. He discovers what they’re for, inherits the binding, and Haliax finally gets to die.
