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Šehhinah #3
The Lives That Argue For Us
Teśena and Kjorel have been in an open relationship for years. But when Kjorel leaves to travel for eight months, Teśena doesn’t really have anyone else to turn to. Well, except the most powerful person in the world…
Everyone knows God is made of fire. So of course no one would ever suggest that the easily-overwhelmed Teśena try praying to Them. Then why, when Teśena tries to do exactly that in a moment of desperation, do they seem to get along so well?
On the other side of the world, Kjorel’s dealing with a loneliness of his own. That is, until he starts his visit to the city of Ēnnuh, and finds a boyfriend within a few days. With no way to contact Teśena, he can only hope their previous agreements stand … or that Teśena will improbably find a way to communicate with him anyway.
After all, what’s a few thousand miles when you have God on your side?
Everyone knows God is made of fire. So of course no one would ever suggest that the easily-overwhelmed Teśena try praying to Them. Then why, when Teśena tries to do exactly that in a moment of desperation, do they seem to get along so well?
On the other side of the world, Kjorel’s dealing with a loneliness of his own. That is, until he starts his visit to the city of Ēnnuh, and finds a boyfriend within a few days. With no way to contact Teśena, he can only hope their previous agreements stand … or that Teśena will improbably find a way to communicate with him anyway.
After all, what’s a few thousand miles when you have God on your side?
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March 19, 2023
Delivering in leaps and bounds, The Lives That Argue For Us might be most concisely described as an entirely unique turnabout, subversion, inside-outing play on the Tower of Babel story. 5,000 years ago, Nam’ir the human theurgist (practitioner of soul-manifesting magic) realizes she is a god. As elaborated in the previous book, The Birds that Fly at Dusk, 'god' is not an obvious, superhuman class of being, but a self-identity that any seemingly-normal human could realize they are and call oneself if it the truth of what they know of themself, yet also due to the fact of soul-magic, a self-identity that can be powerfully physically actualized in the world. The problem is, the world of Šehhinah is a Torah-like setting that already has God, the One God, who is thought of by the world as the only possible god. To the world, saying ‘there can be multiple gods’ is as nonsensical as saying ‘there can be multiple of the individual who is Elisheva’ — no one has even imagined the idea, or if they have, have never made it widely known. And crucially — God has no idea it is possible either. So Nam’ir, in a fit of fear, seals herself in ice, for fear that her existence becoming known to God might enrage Them and cause harm to the world. She tells only Lucifer, her friend, whose traumatized fear of their previous polyphonous God-entangled life as an angel compels them to accept her insistence to keep silent.
Fast forward 5,000 years: in the present, the present the previous two books take place in, Šehhinah is still going strong. It is a peaceful near-utopia with early-1900s level technology and media. Teśena the young weaver’s apprentice in the tropical seafaring region of Askannan is clearly — to the reader, thanks to the intricate worldbuilding set up through the previous two books — but not to aerself or any characters around aer — a god as well. The one person who is hinted to maybe have figured it out, but certainly never told aer, is aer ex-boyfriend Kjorel the traveling painter who abruptly fled across the ocean with his seafaring family when Tesena expressed the wish to make a manifestation much like the manifestation God makes when They burn a person who touches Them, as was done to Tamar in The Stars That Rise at Dawn.
Teśena’s depiction is a tour-de-force, a nonverbal character with an intensely realized inner world and razor-sharp awareness of aerself and the world; while aer strangeness of thought, interpretation, and communication is decidedly unmaskable. Ae can’t use language— spoken, written or signed—and the way aer thoughts are written, even though of course the author writes in words!, never makes the reader wonder why not. It is clear that these are the thoughts of a nonspeaking character. Ae communicates by way of a book of labeled concepts that never feels artificial or unfitting. It is clear the author has experience, whether first-hand understanding or simply second- or third-hand through a great deal of thought, in how this would work believably.
In Askannan, Teśena’s rage and grief and self-loathing over aer rejection and inability to understand what is ‘wrong’ with aer leads aer to a friendship with God. God who, according to the covenant made before even Nam’ir’s time, is still painstakingly listening and sorting through the endless cacophonous arguments of hundreds of generations of the world, about what kind of afterlife should exist.
God is a character with as distinct and delightful a personality as any human character, as any sci-fi alien creature: curious, capricious, laughing, deeply proud and vain, a fierce dominant lover to those They burn, a brilliant incorporeal alien telepath who, like Teśena, also struggles with communicating in language and strives to help Teśena’s paradoxical theurgy barriers, scoffing at the idea that any person can be ‘too much’ or ’too much like themselves’ — though They do not yet know what Nam’ir knew. The way God’s own point of view and expectations are brought through as something relatably familiar enough to feel ironic is fantastically delivered on: God is continually in effect almost saying to Teśena “you are not wrong for existing, look how I am too much to be borne without burning, too Myself, too creating of Myself by being that I am, and yet I am Beautiful and Glorious and I am good to Be — you are also like this” (any readers with a familiarity with the thought of Rabbi Luria take a drink) — but can’t quite put together the last few concepts in Their own mind, and neither can Teśena.
Teśena and God discover and release Nam’ir from ice, where she finds to her mingled dismay and relief, that while the languages, technologies, and societies of the world have changed immeasurably, its theology has been denied the opportunity for growth her existence could have provided. Her secret still sleeps like a buried radioactive mine.
**spoiler alert**
Fast forward 5,000 years: in the present, the present the previous two books take place in, Šehhinah is still going strong. It is a peaceful near-utopia with early-1900s level technology and media. Teśena the young weaver’s apprentice in the tropical seafaring region of Askannan is clearly — to the reader, thanks to the intricate worldbuilding set up through the previous two books — but not to aerself or any characters around aer — a god as well. The one person who is hinted to maybe have figured it out, but certainly never told aer, is aer ex-boyfriend Kjorel the traveling painter who abruptly fled across the ocean with his seafaring family when Tesena expressed the wish to make a manifestation much like the manifestation God makes when They burn a person who touches Them, as was done to Tamar in The Stars That Rise at Dawn.
Teśena’s depiction is a tour-de-force, a nonverbal character with an intensely realized inner world and razor-sharp awareness of aerself and the world; while aer strangeness of thought, interpretation, and communication is decidedly unmaskable. Ae can’t use language— spoken, written or signed—and the way aer thoughts are written, even though of course the author writes in words!, never makes the reader wonder why not. It is clear that these are the thoughts of a nonspeaking character. Ae communicates by way of a book of labeled concepts that never feels artificial or unfitting. It is clear the author has experience, whether first-hand understanding or simply second- or third-hand through a great deal of thought, in how this would work believably.
In Askannan, Teśena’s rage and grief and self-loathing over aer rejection and inability to understand what is ‘wrong’ with aer leads aer to a friendship with God. God who, according to the covenant made before even Nam’ir’s time, is still painstakingly listening and sorting through the endless cacophonous arguments of hundreds of generations of the world, about what kind of afterlife should exist.
God is a character with as distinct and delightful a personality as any human character, as any sci-fi alien creature: curious, capricious, laughing, deeply proud and vain, a fierce dominant lover to those They burn, a brilliant incorporeal alien telepath who, like Teśena, also struggles with communicating in language and strives to help Teśena’s paradoxical theurgy barriers, scoffing at the idea that any person can be ‘too much’ or ’too much like themselves’ — though They do not yet know what Nam’ir knew. The way God’s own point of view and expectations are brought through as something relatably familiar enough to feel ironic is fantastically delivered on: God is continually in effect almost saying to Teśena “you are not wrong for existing, look how I am too much to be borne without burning, too Myself, too creating of Myself by being that I am, and yet I am Beautiful and Glorious and I am good to Be — you are also like this” (any readers with a familiarity with the thought of Rabbi Luria take a drink) — but can’t quite put together the last few concepts in Their own mind, and neither can Teśena.
Teśena and God discover and release Nam’ir from ice, where she finds to her mingled dismay and relief, that while the languages, technologies, and societies of the world have changed immeasurably, its theology has been denied the opportunity for growth her existence could have provided. Her secret still sleeps like a buried radioactive mine.
**spoiler alert**
March 19, 2025
I have no idea if The Lives That Argue For Us was in fact inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin on types of time in his incomparable On The Concept Of History, but in a way it is even more impressive if it was not. I made a longer review on Storygraph, and I will read everything this author writes from this book on, this deserves no less than scholarship attention of the 2020s.
i.
A recount of the Covenant that underpins the series, and inside the series’ world history, and gives name to this book, from The Stars That Rise at Dawn:
Once, Heaven expected; all after death to wake to fire. Now understood desires many. One day at world end, all resurrect to more choices. Which choices? What you wish; I the flame know not. Yet. Your lives will argue for you…
—Evian translation of God’s Covenant, originally delivered without words, 0 A.C. (After Covenant)
As I’ve spilled words on before, this is a marvelously inexhaustible demand and command. One that radiates possible interpretations and implications. One may be a warning about the power of humankind, to humankind: ‘*I* won’t give any rules. that’s *your* job. *you’re* giving *Me* suggestions for rules’ which logically very much includes ‘if you want to make up some terrible rules I’m listening and I’m learning. watch out.’ One may be an implicitly threatening suggestion of radiating power, of humankind to command God to create the future, of God to create the future, of any given human to create the future — one chip of the future, a plurality-weight that creates the future, one person’s or one moment’s argument of the future, out of billions, that is blessed as the future because it alone is capriciously-chosen, because it alone convinces, because it alone prevails, because it alone wrests the blessing? As in much of the series, it comments on jewish thought and mysticism on God and humankind, with a preference for thought-experiments involving reversals: the power of humankind to bless God with a command to use God’s power on, the power of God to bless humankind with Their obedience to humankind — an unknown form of obedience, for ‘humanity’ has no unified voice to follow. God also, it seems, does not know how to obey, but They hold onto all lives lived that They might need to obey, so that They can cite them, redeem (in the jewish sense of buy-back and bring-back) them, and elevate any of them to messianic time.
It befits this book then — counterintuitively yet perfectly elegantly — that it is preoccupied with the past: the past being remembered, the past being gazed upon and unearthed and re-known, the past coming awake.
An early epigraph of the book, tucked into a somewhat humorous context so that its significance is overlooked until later, reads:
Uneasily, it follows that God has the right to end the world, for this is the only way to keep up Their end of the Covenant, and in the face of this most important of agreements made in the world, even the otherwise untenable concept of a right to end the world may stand...—excerpt from a letter written by the anonymous philosopher Faceless of Edom, 4773A.C.
The more accurate term might be ‘responsibility’ rather than ‘right’, but regardless, the thin line is readily invoked.
ii.
The book opens, as the last two books have, with a prologue from some time ago. The last two books’ prologues were from 2 years ago and 10 years ago. This one is from 4,822 years ago. Nam’ir, a human woman of indeterminate youngish age from an ancient society, and a god — in the unique sense that nearly the whole of The Birds that Fly at Dusk occupied itself with defining and describing — seals herself away in ice with the help of a younger but already ancient Lucifer, ostensibly to keep her existence a secret from God, who, she claims, will certainly destroy the world in anger and fear of her, if They knew.
God in this series, and especially this book, is wonderfully and fearfully inscribed by the world’s inhabitants as one who is infinitely blamable, infinitely usable, and infinitely rapeable. This sounds like a sardonic condemnation of the writing or an attempt by me to insist that no you see *this* scapegoating is actually justified — it is neither. God gives little indication of having an attitude other than something like ‘worth it’ to the contingencies that cause Them to inhabit such a position, but the acts of characters who engage in the blame, use, and rape are narratively judged along a quietly cryptic but eventually tease-out-able rubric: the moments when characters act so towards God in order to shrink, hide, or falsify their lives cause misery and stagnation, while those who do so to explode the present moment into an open door of pregnant now-time shot through with chips of ‘ehyeh are blessed, by the author, and bless God with their contendings. God is never a source of reassurance, and in the intensity of Mattering, those who blame, fear, and use Them as an excuse or a tool are closer to understanding Their thoughts and ways than those who minimize Them — even though the nature of Their reaction or what matters to Them never actually aligns with what those fears and blames anticipated.
Again in the theme of time, the first epigraph is one that, only later in the book does the reader realize, was not yet written, and is about a manifestation that did not yet exist, when the chapter it’s attached to took place. The chapter then introduces the character of Tesena, who is quite obviously from aer first appearance, a god, which no one including aer knows at the time, but which the narrative does not even try to be coy about — it trusts that the reader can tell. In the vein of Celyet and Yenatru, but distinct, ae is another character who struggles with words — this time to the point of total nonverbality, including signing or writing. Emotionally devastated by a breakup with aer seafarer boyfriend Kjorel, both of the series-recurring age of 17, ae ruminates bitterly on aer demanding, and being, too-much; before encountering and absurdly befriending God amid a tsunami — the entity who is of course the one who always has been demanding, and who always has been defined as Too Much.
But the only task or question that God gives to Tesena, is God suddenly, amid this meeting, picking up on Nam’ir’s abrupt existence, for the tsunami has broken her from her self-imposed ice prison, and unable to do anything Themself about this particular type of emergency, begs Tesena to rescue Nam’ir who awakened from the past, to help her survive the oncoming tsunami. She awakens to a world that she, briefly, cannot distinguish from the end-of-the-world-of-her-past that she feared. It is remarkably restrained that this novel does not dwell on the person-of-the-far-ancient-past-in-modernity element, no matter how intriguing and appealing it is, for ideas and questions that symbolize the present encountering the future are not the preoccupation of this novel. Nam’ir is not a character who would be well suited to that sort of cryosleep plot line — once reassured (or crushed) by the realization that her secret is still a secret from God, she adjusts to the future with little disconnect or homesickness. For she likely experienced just as much disconnect from humanity and as much homesickness for a nonexistent reality, back in her time of 4,822 years ago, as she experiences now upon waking. For her there is little difference between being a walking secret in modernity or a walking secret at the first dawnings of agriculture.
It is the working of language—linguistic drift, language death, creolizing, God’s and angels’ and fallens’ rusty attestations of languages that can be used to narrow down a date for how long Nam’ir has been asleep—that is chosen as the vehicle through which to impart to Nam’ir and to the reader the sheer length, and even moreso the sheer fullness, of Time that has passed. The chapter — the entire book, actually— lingers on language-based inconveniences and history for disproportionately long, and in doing so conveys a sense of how many people have lived and died, how much life-time has been put into the world, since Nam’ir sealed herself away—laying a groundwork for later in the book.
The core of this series lies in the twist in the middle of this book,
This event’s disruption and usage and building-upon of the delicate worldbuilding of the series’ metaphysics and magic so far is done with a masterful sense of both complete control of written craft that operate the strings of the world, and the author’s curious walking beside the reader to faithfully observe and record all that which is unspooling whether in line with or new to the author’s predictions. It’s a masterfulness that belies description — or rather it would, if the character of God was not already so well described.
iii.
Before this, in another part of the world and another part of the story walks Kjorel, who is my favorite character in this entire series. Written with a tightrope skill and an unyielding stare that brings out a texture that holds up under a dozen rereads, he is literary. Brilliant and charming, with an anthropologist’s subtly-detached and quietly-superior attentiveness to the land and people he travels in, his true desires held in check by feints and coping mechanisms that are genuinely interesting and textured rather than socially-enforced and normalized — the only thing that makes visible their status as coping mechanisms rather than the full extent of his interests and traits are the occasional wobbly, paper like dimensions they take on when he notices something with a bit too profound an insight, or too deeply personal an understanding. Kjorel is a character beset by knowing, mostly inconveniently.
Like a 17 year old boy he deploys this talent for dating prospects and sexual attractiveness, and for creative talents and for exploration of a city, and for speaking many languages effectively. He narrates all he does with what is on one level a fully wholehearted awareness and appreciation for what he perceives, connects, remembers, and understands, the flowing lightning context of human intelligence and consciousness working to bring him more pleasure than is accessible to most people; on another level he narrates it to race the world frantically, keeping abreast with what he perceives and understands so that he can catch it in the collected hands of his mind and render it like fat into something just inert enough for him to bear, flinging explanations under the feet of the present like nets. For most of the book, and in most of his scenes, it's unclear from within his own thoughts why he would be so jostled, but the fact he is jostled by something he won’t articulate is itself the thing that is most telling.
It is Kjorel who has the greatest grasp, or at least is on the closest mental wavelength, to God, during the revelatory chaos of the second of the book: there are crucial and enriching overlaps of thought between God and many other characters — Tesena, Nam’ir, Tamar, Lucifer — these overlaps helping reinforce and bring out and elucidate the many complex facets of God and of each character, but in both comparison and contrast the weird upside-down parallel staircase of Kjorel and God, where the soles of their feet touch as they race through the same spirals, is the most immense and full.
As, and after, he sees the pillar and learns what Tesena is, he is tortured and savaged by his terrible, kafkaesque knowing. Such leitworts and motifs dog the entire book: language, knowing. The word ‘communication’ has been rendered sterile and purile by cooption by the supraculture of mental and professional sophistry: ‘transmission’ may evoke this leitwort’s staticky, crackling, slender exchange of precious bleeps of data more accurately: Yenatru's concussion temporarily generates a kaleidoscope of strange dreamlike nonsense similes and unbound usage of grammar, Nam’ir speaks a dead tongue no living humans speak, Tesena uses a DIY book crafted for an elaborate analog AAC structure, that is labeled with words in Askannite, God transmits in telepathy crafted without words, Tamar antennae’s-up mental impressions from those in her vicinity like a tuning radio and advertises what God did to her and what she has done without a veil, while a seductive half-clear veil is deployed purposely by the Holies of Askannan, God’s breakdown screeches like feedback, from every conversation between people with one, or two, or more language barriers is painstakingly written and choreographed to bring in translators and translations. A messenger — Yairen — is sent to bring news of Nam’ir to Lucifer, a loudspeaker and a radio station crackles public announcements, a telegram sends private news. Transmission is the substance; the object and cause of the characters’ derangements — internal and external, intrapersonal and interpersonal madness — is knowing. There is knowing and knowing, and no one knows with as much catastrophic power as God — except for Kjorel, who has managed to spend an unknown amount of his life dancing to keep himself from knowing that which God would sell Themself to know.
Like Kjorel, it is a wave of urgent, terrifying implications that dominates God’s reaction. God is not free to celebrate the future, cannot indulge in the thirst for knowledge that builds-upon and continues un-blasted-out from this revelation that made Them so amenable to making the covenant — your lives will argue for you — in the beginning. God as a person may be curious, mirthful, demanding-more, but more than all Their own soulbound traits is the fact that They are the one who cut a covenant, and made a promise, to all the dead who have ever lived: to end the world so that all the lives that have ever ended may be reclaimed and their arguments made citable. God experiences this as a devastating emergency of memory that the dead are not safe from but are indeed the most vulnerable to: God owes life to the dead, They owe life to the living, They owe the world to the world, They owe the reckoning of ended-lives to the dead and the reckoning of current-lives to the living, They owe acknowledgment to Tesena, for if They cannot act decisively to determine this as enough to force Them to go against Their personal selfish and jealous love of the world They have invited and recorded all this time, what can?
God, with Their rewinding wheels of magnetic tape and ancient chains, stares fixedly past Tamar’s young and haughty human-lifespan exhortations to look at the wild and shattered-open glee of possibility that she experienced when she saw Them; They stare instead, clutching Their hair and face like Klee’s angel, at the billions of dead lives of history, that occupies Them into dread against Their natural proclivities.
The demand by the living to not end the world is powerful but pushes God even further into a paralysis of the paradox that They can’t solve or balance, but in this paralysis of Stillstellung other moments crowd in, echoing previous moments of the series and the world, until the two most private, personal, intense ones at the very end of the book. I am out of words, and cannot muster up more.
i.
A recount of the Covenant that underpins the series, and inside the series’ world history, and gives name to this book, from The Stars That Rise at Dawn:
Once, Heaven expected; all after death to wake to fire. Now understood desires many. One day at world end, all resurrect to more choices. Which choices? What you wish; I the flame know not. Yet. Your lives will argue for you…
—Evian translation of God’s Covenant, originally delivered without words, 0 A.C. (After Covenant)
As I’ve spilled words on before, this is a marvelously inexhaustible demand and command. One that radiates possible interpretations and implications. One may be a warning about the power of humankind, to humankind: ‘*I* won’t give any rules. that’s *your* job. *you’re* giving *Me* suggestions for rules’ which logically very much includes ‘if you want to make up some terrible rules I’m listening and I’m learning. watch out.’ One may be an implicitly threatening suggestion of radiating power, of humankind to command God to create the future, of God to create the future, of any given human to create the future — one chip of the future, a plurality-weight that creates the future, one person’s or one moment’s argument of the future, out of billions, that is blessed as the future because it alone is capriciously-chosen, because it alone convinces, because it alone prevails, because it alone wrests the blessing? As in much of the series, it comments on jewish thought and mysticism on God and humankind, with a preference for thought-experiments involving reversals: the power of humankind to bless God with a command to use God’s power on, the power of God to bless humankind with Their obedience to humankind — an unknown form of obedience, for ‘humanity’ has no unified voice to follow. God also, it seems, does not know how to obey, but They hold onto all lives lived that They might need to obey, so that They can cite them, redeem (in the jewish sense of buy-back and bring-back) them, and elevate any of them to messianic time.
It befits this book then — counterintuitively yet perfectly elegantly — that it is preoccupied with the past: the past being remembered, the past being gazed upon and unearthed and re-known, the past coming awake.
An early epigraph of the book, tucked into a somewhat humorous context so that its significance is overlooked until later, reads:
Uneasily, it follows that God has the right to end the world, for this is the only way to keep up Their end of the Covenant, and in the face of this most important of agreements made in the world, even the otherwise untenable concept of a right to end the world may stand...—excerpt from a letter written by the anonymous philosopher Faceless of Edom, 4773A.C.
The more accurate term might be ‘responsibility’ rather than ‘right’, but regardless, the thin line is readily invoked.
ii.
The book opens, as the last two books have, with a prologue from some time ago. The last two books’ prologues were from 2 years ago and 10 years ago. This one is from 4,822 years ago. Nam’ir, a human woman of indeterminate youngish age from an ancient society, and a god — in the unique sense that nearly the whole of The Birds that Fly at Dusk occupied itself with defining and describing — seals herself away in ice with the help of a younger but already ancient Lucifer, ostensibly to keep her existence a secret from God, who, she claims, will certainly destroy the world in anger and fear of her, if They knew.
God in this series, and especially this book, is wonderfully and fearfully inscribed by the world’s inhabitants as one who is infinitely blamable, infinitely usable, and infinitely rapeable. This sounds like a sardonic condemnation of the writing or an attempt by me to insist that no you see *this* scapegoating is actually justified — it is neither. God gives little indication of having an attitude other than something like ‘worth it’ to the contingencies that cause Them to inhabit such a position, but the acts of characters who engage in the blame, use, and rape are narratively judged along a quietly cryptic but eventually tease-out-able rubric: the moments when characters act so towards God in order to shrink, hide, or falsify their lives cause misery and stagnation, while those who do so to explode the present moment into an open door of pregnant now-time shot through with chips of ‘ehyeh are blessed, by the author, and bless God with their contendings. God is never a source of reassurance, and in the intensity of Mattering, those who blame, fear, and use Them as an excuse or a tool are closer to understanding Their thoughts and ways than those who minimize Them — even though the nature of Their reaction or what matters to Them never actually aligns with what those fears and blames anticipated.
Again in the theme of time, the first epigraph is one that, only later in the book does the reader realize, was not yet written, and is about a manifestation that did not yet exist, when the chapter it’s attached to took place. The chapter then introduces the character of Tesena, who is quite obviously from aer first appearance, a god, which no one including aer knows at the time, but which the narrative does not even try to be coy about — it trusts that the reader can tell. In the vein of Celyet and Yenatru, but distinct, ae is another character who struggles with words — this time to the point of total nonverbality, including signing or writing. Emotionally devastated by a breakup with aer seafarer boyfriend Kjorel, both of the series-recurring age of 17, ae ruminates bitterly on aer demanding, and being, too-much; before encountering and absurdly befriending God amid a tsunami — the entity who is of course the one who always has been demanding, and who always has been defined as Too Much.
But the only task or question that God gives to Tesena, is God suddenly, amid this meeting, picking up on Nam’ir’s abrupt existence, for the tsunami has broken her from her self-imposed ice prison, and unable to do anything Themself about this particular type of emergency, begs Tesena to rescue Nam’ir who awakened from the past, to help her survive the oncoming tsunami. She awakens to a world that she, briefly, cannot distinguish from the end-of-the-world-of-her-past that she feared. It is remarkably restrained that this novel does not dwell on the person-of-the-far-ancient-past-in-modernity element, no matter how intriguing and appealing it is, for ideas and questions that symbolize the present encountering the future are not the preoccupation of this novel. Nam’ir is not a character who would be well suited to that sort of cryosleep plot line — once reassured (or crushed) by the realization that her secret is still a secret from God, she adjusts to the future with little disconnect or homesickness. For she likely experienced just as much disconnect from humanity and as much homesickness for a nonexistent reality, back in her time of 4,822 years ago, as she experiences now upon waking. For her there is little difference between being a walking secret in modernity or a walking secret at the first dawnings of agriculture.
It is the working of language—linguistic drift, language death, creolizing, God’s and angels’ and fallens’ rusty attestations of languages that can be used to narrow down a date for how long Nam’ir has been asleep—that is chosen as the vehicle through which to impart to Nam’ir and to the reader the sheer length, and even moreso the sheer fullness, of Time that has passed. The chapter — the entire book, actually— lingers on language-based inconveniences and history for disproportionately long, and in doing so conveys a sense of how many people have lived and died, how much life-time has been put into the world, since Nam’ir sealed herself away—laying a groundwork for later in the book.
The core of this series lies in the twist in the middle of this book,
This event’s disruption and usage and building-upon of the delicate worldbuilding of the series’ metaphysics and magic so far is done with a masterful sense of both complete control of written craft that operate the strings of the world, and the author’s curious walking beside the reader to faithfully observe and record all that which is unspooling whether in line with or new to the author’s predictions. It’s a masterfulness that belies description — or rather it would, if the character of God was not already so well described.
iii.
Before this, in another part of the world and another part of the story walks Kjorel, who is my favorite character in this entire series. Written with a tightrope skill and an unyielding stare that brings out a texture that holds up under a dozen rereads, he is literary. Brilliant and charming, with an anthropologist’s subtly-detached and quietly-superior attentiveness to the land and people he travels in, his true desires held in check by feints and coping mechanisms that are genuinely interesting and textured rather than socially-enforced and normalized — the only thing that makes visible their status as coping mechanisms rather than the full extent of his interests and traits are the occasional wobbly, paper like dimensions they take on when he notices something with a bit too profound an insight, or too deeply personal an understanding. Kjorel is a character beset by knowing, mostly inconveniently.
Like a 17 year old boy he deploys this talent for dating prospects and sexual attractiveness, and for creative talents and for exploration of a city, and for speaking many languages effectively. He narrates all he does with what is on one level a fully wholehearted awareness and appreciation for what he perceives, connects, remembers, and understands, the flowing lightning context of human intelligence and consciousness working to bring him more pleasure than is accessible to most people; on another level he narrates it to race the world frantically, keeping abreast with what he perceives and understands so that he can catch it in the collected hands of his mind and render it like fat into something just inert enough for him to bear, flinging explanations under the feet of the present like nets. For most of the book, and in most of his scenes, it's unclear from within his own thoughts why he would be so jostled, but the fact he is jostled by something he won’t articulate is itself the thing that is most telling.
It is Kjorel who has the greatest grasp, or at least is on the closest mental wavelength, to God, during the revelatory chaos of the second of the book: there are crucial and enriching overlaps of thought between God and many other characters — Tesena, Nam’ir, Tamar, Lucifer — these overlaps helping reinforce and bring out and elucidate the many complex facets of God and of each character, but in both comparison and contrast the weird upside-down parallel staircase of Kjorel and God, where the soles of their feet touch as they race through the same spirals, is the most immense and full.
As, and after, he sees the pillar and learns what Tesena is, he is tortured and savaged by his terrible, kafkaesque knowing. Such leitworts and motifs dog the entire book: language, knowing. The word ‘communication’ has been rendered sterile and purile by cooption by the supraculture of mental and professional sophistry: ‘transmission’ may evoke this leitwort’s staticky, crackling, slender exchange of precious bleeps of data more accurately: Yenatru's concussion temporarily generates a kaleidoscope of strange dreamlike nonsense similes and unbound usage of grammar, Nam’ir speaks a dead tongue no living humans speak, Tesena uses a DIY book crafted for an elaborate analog AAC structure, that is labeled with words in Askannite, God transmits in telepathy crafted without words, Tamar antennae’s-up mental impressions from those in her vicinity like a tuning radio and advertises what God did to her and what she has done without a veil, while a seductive half-clear veil is deployed purposely by the Holies of Askannan, God’s breakdown screeches like feedback, from every conversation between people with one, or two, or more language barriers is painstakingly written and choreographed to bring in translators and translations. A messenger — Yairen — is sent to bring news of Nam’ir to Lucifer, a loudspeaker and a radio station crackles public announcements, a telegram sends private news. Transmission is the substance; the object and cause of the characters’ derangements — internal and external, intrapersonal and interpersonal madness — is knowing. There is knowing and knowing, and no one knows with as much catastrophic power as God — except for Kjorel, who has managed to spend an unknown amount of his life dancing to keep himself from knowing that which God would sell Themself to know.
Like Kjorel, it is a wave of urgent, terrifying implications that dominates God’s reaction. God is not free to celebrate the future, cannot indulge in the thirst for knowledge that builds-upon and continues un-blasted-out from this revelation that made Them so amenable to making the covenant — your lives will argue for you — in the beginning. God as a person may be curious, mirthful, demanding-more, but more than all Their own soulbound traits is the fact that They are the one who cut a covenant, and made a promise, to all the dead who have ever lived: to end the world so that all the lives that have ever ended may be reclaimed and their arguments made citable. God experiences this as a devastating emergency of memory that the dead are not safe from but are indeed the most vulnerable to: God owes life to the dead, They owe life to the living, They owe the world to the world, They owe the reckoning of ended-lives to the dead and the reckoning of current-lives to the living, They owe acknowledgment to Tesena, for if They cannot act decisively to determine this as enough to force Them to go against Their personal selfish and jealous love of the world They have invited and recorded all this time, what can?
God, with Their rewinding wheels of magnetic tape and ancient chains, stares fixedly past Tamar’s young and haughty human-lifespan exhortations to look at the wild and shattered-open glee of possibility that she experienced when she saw Them; They stare instead, clutching Their hair and face like Klee’s angel, at the billions of dead lives of history, that occupies Them into dread against Their natural proclivities.
The demand by the living to not end the world is powerful but pushes God even further into a paralysis of the paradox that They can’t solve or balance, but in this paralysis of Stillstellung other moments crowd in, echoing previous moments of the series and the world, until the two most private, personal, intense ones at the very end of the book. I am out of words, and cannot muster up more.
March 6, 2023
The orientation of this book is bright, speculative curiosity towards a most thoughtful and unusual focus: examining what a god is and how gods who are not God come to existence, and by extension, the possibilities of what souls can enact on the world. Also, an unapologetic defense of acquiring and facing the existence of dangerous knowledge, living in a freaklike inhuman way, and tossing aside a secondary world’s status-quo.
More like 4.5, but I'll round down for now.
This book is the opposite of all those trilogies where the last entry is weak and unsatisfying. The Lives That Argue For Us is undoubtedly the best entry in the series, it is so good that if one did not enjoy the previous two books, this book would make reading the previous two worth it.
Once again it partly takes place with new characters in a new setting, this time the seafaring coastal city Askannan. However within a few chapters it crosses over with the characters from book 1, and around the middle crosses over more minimally with the characters from book 2. This is handled much more satisfyingly than the almost total shift from book 1 to book 2. The main new characters, Teśena and Kjorel, are wonderfully written — mysterious, complicated, with no neat background or explanation for their complexity or dysfunctionality but a very believable and powerful resolution and reintegration regardless. Teśena is one of the best depictions of a character with major disabilities related to communication and information processing I’ve seen yet — intense, domineering, and tortured. Aer alienation and difficulty in connecting with others isn’t irrelevant, but is not the main point of aer character either, one gets the impression it’s written as a parallel with God’s nonverbal, nonhuman, yet expressive and responsive nature and a way to communicate both the image-heavy intensity and trapped, alienated feeling of being a God who doesn’t know ae is a God. Kjorel is similarly deftly conceived of, as someone who knows Too Much and is afraid of how well he understands, hiding it from the world and from himself, avoiding making any choices or changes for himself based on it (in effect, trying not to Argue with his life). Most crossover with the characters from book 1 is accomplished through his POV, and it works fantastically well. The way the chapter where he meets Lucifer and the one where he meets Tamar seem so much better and make him (and the characters he’s meeting) so much more deep and interesting, than the chapters where he meets or interacts with Yenatru seems like a flaw at first — but soon it starts to become clear this is intentional, and in fact the author’s ability to deploy different writing styles and move between different registers of casualness vs formality, interiority vs comedic physicality from chapter to chapter, is very, very well used.
By this book there is no doubt in my mind: Šehhinah contains my favorite depiction of God I’ve ever read in fiction. From Their first appearance, bending attentively over Teśena with smug gleeful arrogance like a summoned genie with folded arms, to Their last appearance, bowing low before aer with wry admiring laughter, Their charm, charisma, and vividness never abates. They are complex and paradoxical, being extremely prideful and careless, yet extending that brash confidence to all other beings. Extremely bad at understanding beings unlike themself, but dedicated to achieving this understanding despite being bad at it. I really get the sense that the basic principles of the world, in its amoral branching chains of diverse recombination, feels exactly like what an entity like this would invite and will into existence to mirror Its impulses and curiosity. I found the character of God delicious in book 1, and interesting in their more limited appearance in book 2, but this book, where they go through a truly transformative arc of confusion, dazzled shock, horror, panic, desperate despair and bitterness, to wicked delight in being defeated and excitement at being able to give other people some of their responsibilities, and never look away from or try to minimize the truth once they see it, is the best. And what, what a partnership they make with Tamar! And the many other holies who appear!
I think this does lead to some characters-reactions to being a God (or knowing what a God is) to pale a bit in comparison. Nearly everything about Teśena was perfect, including stuff that was only about aer by implication (Yairen tricking Tamar into understanding God’s recognition of Teśena by analogy), except for the slight seeming reluctance to depict a sincerely proud, dominant hunger to inflict aerself on another person’s body and mind, a reluctance that doesn’t rear its head in the the depiction of God. But Nam’ir is almost but not quite an ideal representation of a deeply repressed God who fears her own power deeply and who has the more kind/ sacrificially-coded but more damaging Godlike arrogance to make decisions on behalf of the rest of the world, but by hiding her existence and nature rather than asking for input. Her preoccupation with Lucifer and Iešua weakens her character’s arc a little, by somewhat burying the focus on the warped consequences and controllingness of her decisions to hide the truth — a contrast could be made with the mildly unsatisfying treatment of Nam’ir here with the very deft, delicate treatment of Tamar and Eliya in book 1, with its layered ironies of projections vs motives vs impact vs subsequent helpful consequences.
Also it doesn’t quite ring true to me, that Lucifer would be so understanding and accepting of the idea of other Gods. With Lucifer’s fear, avoidance, compulsiveness, how exactly did they just put the concept of ‘more Gods exist’ on a mental shelf for millennia and remain beatifically accepting and supportive of Nam'ir and Yenatru, without developing any weird complexes around it? The fact that they are accepting and in the know is used very well however, and really pays off later on, when it’s only after the further implications, such as the fact that Gods have souls that are overwhelming and intense and can have a massively-changing effect on people finally hits them, that they become distressed. But the reason why they could be okay with it at all for thousands of years, whether it was mental sanitization of the concept or something else, is not so well explained.
The very last main chapter had some wobbles and murky fumbles that made the climax a little less hardlight than it could have been. The idea of other Gods making more worlds for resurrected people is so good, and so is the idea of God admitting they really don’t want to ever end the world, and Lucifer begging for the world to end, but the other thread of maybe another God being able to end the world easily kind of muddles it, as does the not quite perfect landing in delineating other Gods’ worlds from other planets. The argument that one of the hurdles to resurrection has been that this planet is too small is unconvincing due to the real-world-esque, many-planets nature of this universe. These kinds of arguments would work much better in a world where the earth is not a planet orbiting the sun amongst other planets and suns — a geocentric flat-earth world like in multiple Near-Eastern mythologies, perhaps. In a more scientifically realistic world it doesn’t gel as well. This isn't really that big an issue — the openness of the ending and the extreme strength of the epilogue means having some muddles and misses even feels fitting, but I think it could have been sharper.
There’s some retroactive buzzkills as well: namely Jibril’s attitude towards God in book 2 — fond condescension as one would give a beautiful bimbo, and dismissive lack of interest or desire to try to communicate God or understand anything God might be trying to say. This was pretty funny back then, but after this book, with its clear depiction of the complexity of information that dedicated effort or natural affinity can glean from interactions with God (with Tamar and Teśena, and by implication Kjorel off-page), and its parallelism of God and Teśena, showing the depth of Teśena’s communication with those who bother to engage with it, Jibril’s remarks retroactively sound more like extremely patronizing ableism rather than charming irreverence.
But these are not really monumental issues at all. The concepts depicted in this book are fascinating and ambitious, and are executed very very well, beyond the setup's expectations — a lot is left loose and up in the air at the end, but in a finely-threaded way that fits the series perfectly, the joy of realization and opening-up, of oxygen and other chemicals rushing in rather than a neat resolution and close. I would not say no to a sequel series expanding on further implications, but don’t feel like things were left in an at all unsatisfying endpoint either. I’ve seen someone described this series as manga-like. I agree. The impression of reading from a zeitgeist that’s alien to what I’ve been reading for many years previously is very strong given this is from an american author, and a good re-set to my brain. It was quite difficult to review this book because it says so much, in such a bound-up manner, especially in abstracting and analogizing the definition or significance of Gods precisely by comparing them to the mysticism of monotheistic essence underpinning the biblical God. But also by abstracting and analogizing the concept of Theurgy, and it has taken all of the past two books to explore the intricacy of the process of doing that. I might edit this review later to add in some choice quotes -- for there are many, MANY of these.
More like 4.5, but I'll round down for now.
This book is the opposite of all those trilogies where the last entry is weak and unsatisfying. The Lives That Argue For Us is undoubtedly the best entry in the series, it is so good that if one did not enjoy the previous two books, this book would make reading the previous two worth it.
Once again it partly takes place with new characters in a new setting, this time the seafaring coastal city Askannan. However within a few chapters it crosses over with the characters from book 1, and around the middle crosses over more minimally with the characters from book 2. This is handled much more satisfyingly than the almost total shift from book 1 to book 2. The main new characters, Teśena and Kjorel, are wonderfully written — mysterious, complicated, with no neat background or explanation for their complexity or dysfunctionality but a very believable and powerful resolution and reintegration regardless. Teśena is one of the best depictions of a character with major disabilities related to communication and information processing I’ve seen yet — intense, domineering, and tortured. Aer alienation and difficulty in connecting with others isn’t irrelevant, but is not the main point of aer character either, one gets the impression it’s written as a parallel with God’s nonverbal, nonhuman, yet expressive and responsive nature and a way to communicate both the image-heavy intensity and trapped, alienated feeling of being a God who doesn’t know ae is a God. Kjorel is similarly deftly conceived of, as someone who knows Too Much and is afraid of how well he understands, hiding it from the world and from himself, avoiding making any choices or changes for himself based on it (in effect, trying not to Argue with his life). Most crossover with the characters from book 1 is accomplished through his POV, and it works fantastically well. The way the chapter where he meets Lucifer and the one where he meets Tamar seem so much better and make him (and the characters he’s meeting) so much more deep and interesting, than the chapters where he meets or interacts with Yenatru seems like a flaw at first — but soon it starts to become clear this is intentional, and in fact the author’s ability to deploy different writing styles and move between different registers of casualness vs formality, interiority vs comedic physicality from chapter to chapter, is very, very well used.
By this book there is no doubt in my mind: Šehhinah contains my favorite depiction of God I’ve ever read in fiction. From Their first appearance, bending attentively over Teśena with smug gleeful arrogance like a summoned genie with folded arms, to Their last appearance, bowing low before aer with wry admiring laughter, Their charm, charisma, and vividness never abates. They are complex and paradoxical, being extremely prideful and careless, yet extending that brash confidence to all other beings. Extremely bad at understanding beings unlike themself, but dedicated to achieving this understanding despite being bad at it. I really get the sense that the basic principles of the world, in its amoral branching chains of diverse recombination, feels exactly like what an entity like this would invite and will into existence to mirror Its impulses and curiosity. I found the character of God delicious in book 1, and interesting in their more limited appearance in book 2, but this book, where they go through a truly transformative arc of confusion, dazzled shock, horror, panic, desperate despair and bitterness, to wicked delight in being defeated and excitement at being able to give other people some of their responsibilities, and never look away from or try to minimize the truth once they see it, is the best. And what, what a partnership they make with Tamar! And the many other holies who appear!
I think this does lead to some characters-reactions to being a God (or knowing what a God is) to pale a bit in comparison. Nearly everything about Teśena was perfect, including stuff that was only about aer by implication (Yairen tricking Tamar into understanding God’s recognition of Teśena by analogy), except for the slight seeming reluctance to depict a sincerely proud, dominant hunger to inflict aerself on another person’s body and mind, a reluctance that doesn’t rear its head in the the depiction of God. But Nam’ir is almost but not quite an ideal representation of a deeply repressed God who fears her own power deeply and who has the more kind/ sacrificially-coded but more damaging Godlike arrogance to make decisions on behalf of the rest of the world, but by hiding her existence and nature rather than asking for input. Her preoccupation with Lucifer and Iešua weakens her character’s arc a little, by somewhat burying the focus on the warped consequences and controllingness of her decisions to hide the truth — a contrast could be made with the mildly unsatisfying treatment of Nam’ir here with the very deft, delicate treatment of Tamar and Eliya in book 1, with its layered ironies of projections vs motives vs impact vs subsequent helpful consequences.
Also it doesn’t quite ring true to me, that Lucifer would be so understanding and accepting of the idea of other Gods. With Lucifer’s fear, avoidance, compulsiveness, how exactly did they just put the concept of ‘more Gods exist’ on a mental shelf for millennia and remain beatifically accepting and supportive of Nam'ir and Yenatru, without developing any weird complexes around it? The fact that they are accepting and in the know is used very well however, and really pays off later on, when it’s only after the further implications, such as the fact that Gods have souls that are overwhelming and intense and can have a massively-changing effect on people finally hits them, that they become distressed. But the reason why they could be okay with it at all for thousands of years, whether it was mental sanitization of the concept or something else, is not so well explained.
The very last main chapter had some wobbles and murky fumbles that made the climax a little less hardlight than it could have been. The idea of other Gods making more worlds for resurrected people is so good, and so is the idea of God admitting they really don’t want to ever end the world, and Lucifer begging for the world to end, but the other thread of maybe another God being able to end the world easily kind of muddles it, as does the not quite perfect landing in delineating other Gods’ worlds from other planets. The argument that one of the hurdles to resurrection has been that this planet is too small is unconvincing due to the real-world-esque, many-planets nature of this universe. These kinds of arguments would work much better in a world where the earth is not a planet orbiting the sun amongst other planets and suns — a geocentric flat-earth world like in multiple Near-Eastern mythologies, perhaps. In a more scientifically realistic world it doesn’t gel as well. This isn't really that big an issue — the openness of the ending and the extreme strength of the epilogue means having some muddles and misses even feels fitting, but I think it could have been sharper.
There’s some retroactive buzzkills as well: namely Jibril’s attitude towards God in book 2 — fond condescension as one would give a beautiful bimbo, and dismissive lack of interest or desire to try to communicate God or understand anything God might be trying to say. This was pretty funny back then, but after this book, with its clear depiction of the complexity of information that dedicated effort or natural affinity can glean from interactions with God (with Tamar and Teśena, and by implication Kjorel off-page), and its parallelism of God and Teśena, showing the depth of Teśena’s communication with those who bother to engage with it, Jibril’s remarks retroactively sound more like extremely patronizing ableism rather than charming irreverence.
But these are not really monumental issues at all. The concepts depicted in this book are fascinating and ambitious, and are executed very very well, beyond the setup's expectations — a lot is left loose and up in the air at the end, but in a finely-threaded way that fits the series perfectly, the joy of realization and opening-up, of oxygen and other chemicals rushing in rather than a neat resolution and close. I would not say no to a sequel series expanding on further implications, but don’t feel like things were left in an at all unsatisfying endpoint either. I’ve seen someone described this series as manga-like. I agree. The impression of reading from a zeitgeist that’s alien to what I’ve been reading for many years previously is very strong given this is from an american author, and a good re-set to my brain. It was quite difficult to review this book because it says so much, in such a bound-up manner, especially in abstracting and analogizing the definition or significance of Gods precisely by comparing them to the mysticism of monotheistic essence underpinning the biblical God. But also by abstracting and analogizing the concept of Theurgy, and it has taken all of the past two books to explore the intricacy of the process of doing that. I might edit this review later to add in some choice quotes -- for there are many, MANY of these.
February 7, 2024
I've spent months putting off reviewing this, because it was so incredible I couldn't come up with the words to describe my experience. It was like staring into the soul of a fierce and burning-sharp creature whose patterns I could trace forever, like Tamar the very first scene in the first book of this series. And it was also at the same time, a savory, juicy narrative experience of wonderful but straightforward prose, fascinating character POVs, sensorily-rich set pieces, and tightly woven, meaning-packed plot threads that spun out with a dexterity far above the previous books.
The pacing is once again unusual, but in a way that feels deliberate and controlled rather than instinctive -- a 'climactic' event happens at basically the exact 50% mark, and the later 50% is spent developing the fallout with as much attention and care as the buildup, so be prepared for a surprise there! It's the opposite of the disheartening experience of checking the dwindling pagecount left and wondering how the writer is going to wrap anything up before the end. Instead it's going 'how is she going to fill this many pages without dragging and underwhelming this?', and not only does she fill it, almost every chapter manages to be deeper and richer than the last one.
There are so many scenes that are so delightful and immersive that I could read them over and over again: Teśena first meeting with God, Kjorel and Lucifer carefully bumping equally well-hidden neuroses at the manifested sand dune, Kjorel painting Tamar while becoming more and more deranged as he goes on but never losing his powers of observation, Kjorel being deranged at least two octaves higher, and in reverse, later in the bar bathroom, at least three different chapters where different characters try to wrangle attempted definitions of the word 'god' from entirely different frameworks, and the cacophony of curiosity and voices in "The Argument"! But a scene so raw-nerve beautiful I could only once bear to re-read it is
My only disappointment: I need more Nam'ir!!! I was so fascinated by her and the potential storytelling possibilities she and her plotline held, but of course only a small amount could fit in this novel. I am ravenous! So much time she's been able to live through in a few days!
The pacing is once again unusual, but in a way that feels deliberate and controlled rather than instinctive -- a 'climactic' event happens at basically the exact 50% mark, and the later 50% is spent developing the fallout with as much attention and care as the buildup, so be prepared for a surprise there! It's the opposite of the disheartening experience of checking the dwindling pagecount left and wondering how the writer is going to wrap anything up before the end. Instead it's going 'how is she going to fill this many pages without dragging and underwhelming this?', and not only does she fill it, almost every chapter manages to be deeper and richer than the last one.
There are so many scenes that are so delightful and immersive that I could read them over and over again: Teśena first meeting with God, Kjorel and Lucifer carefully bumping equally well-hidden neuroses at the manifested sand dune, Kjorel painting Tamar while becoming more and more deranged as he goes on but never losing his powers of observation, Kjorel being deranged at least two octaves higher, and in reverse, later in the bar bathroom, at least three different chapters where different characters try to wrangle attempted definitions of the word 'god' from entirely different frameworks, and the cacophony of curiosity and voices in "The Argument"! But a scene so raw-nerve beautiful I could only once bear to re-read it is
My only disappointment: I need more Nam'ir!!! I was so fascinated by her and the potential storytelling possibilities she and her plotline held, but of course only a small amount could fit in this novel. I am ravenous! So much time she's been able to live through in a few days!
July 19, 2025
This blew all my expectations out of the water. How do you resolve a premise involving a deeply Jewish-feeling fantasy series that is both rather low-stakes slice-of-life yet sets up an internally terrifying and world-shattering theological problem. A series that both involves God as a charming, curious, tricksterly character who delights in inviting the new and the other and the chaotic and can be actually worthy of monotheism; and the secret realization that God is not in fact the only god, and that there are normal humans who, if told this secret, could, by identifying as a god, make it become so, reach apotheosis and in effect topple Them in some way? This book manages to do it without throwing ANY character, concept, or facet under the bus.
The characters from the previous two books appear to great satisfying effect, I was especially delighted by every scene of Tamar, but the emphasis is firmly on the new characters: Nam'ir the ancient god who magically sealed herself away to protect the world and God from her apocalyptic secret, like if the Beast of Revelation had severe scrupulosity. Tesena the wrong, too-much, too-intense, overflowing tsunami of a person who befriends God without realizing why They seem so similar to aer, and Kjorel, Tesena's former boyfriend-cum-victim-of-eldritch madness who is fleeing from his home and his love to try to avoid what he knows. The secret comes to a head near the 50% mark, and that's when things go up yet another notch of interesting (and brutally honest, and emotionally raw like a flayed nerve).
The characters from the previous two books appear to great satisfying effect, I was especially delighted by every scene of Tamar, but the emphasis is firmly on the new characters: Nam'ir the ancient god who magically sealed herself away to protect the world and God from her apocalyptic secret, like if the Beast of Revelation had severe scrupulosity. Tesena the wrong, too-much, too-intense, overflowing tsunami of a person who befriends God without realizing why They seem so similar to aer, and Kjorel, Tesena's former boyfriend-cum-victim-of-eldritch madness who is fleeing from his home and his love to try to avoid what he knows. The secret comes to a head near the 50% mark, and that's when things go up yet another notch of interesting (and brutally honest, and emotionally raw like a flayed nerve).
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