There are several loose ends I would like to see resolved in the “Salvos” series. For instance, the Devil treated Salvos terribly in book 10, when she teleported from that sacrificial portal into his pocket space, and she was wounded, exhausted and trying to process the fact that she had to leave her companions and friends, and everybody knows her secret now so it’s a big question how they will react to her when she comes back; will everybody hate her? Will she be able to function normally there like before? She was processing it all so hard, she couldn’t even concentrate on half of what the Devil was saying to her, and he was so into his stupid idea of seeing her as entertainment, that he completely failed to see her as a person. So, instead of giving her the time to heal, rest and basically get her shit together, possibly talk her through that stuff, he told her she’s nothing compared to what’s out there, took her on a tour of the Multiverse, additionally traumatised her to the point where she was shaking, and then he dumped her into the Netherworld, at exactly the worst possible time, when the plane was resetting, and between the ocean of lava and black lightning there was also a whole Netherworld full of wild demons trying to kill everything that moves, and the only place she could go hide and heal was the underground cavern that turned out to be his lost kingdom brimming with Corruption.

Also, when they met again, the first thing he did was chastise her for being arrogant. To which she responded by healing his soul and giving him his life back, and he’s now with Belphegor in his old kingdom, reclaiming his actual life and dealing with the outcomes of his failures rather than going around like a crazy person, emulating Trico so that everybody would hate him and throw rocks at him, which he in his guilt thought was a just punishment for his role in the whole end of the world affair.

So, what is he going to do when Belphegor asks him how did he find such an admirable person, telling him about his experience with his daughter? Grin guiltily and admit he was treating her as entertainment and he was being a total asshole? They both owe her one.

Fortunately, there just happens to be a person by the name of Soli who just happens to be the designated enemy of the Arcraem and is working on destroying the world, and I think it’s Trico himself, and it’s a problem Salvos won’t be able to solve on her own. It would be nice to see the three of them heal that old wound like a proper family, especially if Salvos indeed happens to be a reincarnation of Via, and forgives Samuel for his role in her death. In any case, I don’t think the ritual of Regnorex will be something that’s easily solved, especially if Soli is the one behind it. Also, they can’t truly deal with him without breaking the ancient interdiction that prohibits them from killing another Worldwalker under threat of their world being completely destroyed; and yes, Idu will be waiting for just that kind of an excuse, and unless Salvos ascends to the status of a True God, nothing can be done about that one since he’s too powerful.

But Samuel needs to make it up to Salvos for treating her like shit instead of actual family, and she did promise to come see Belphegor again, when she’s strong enough. It would be fun if she came back through that wall of infinite corruption where the broken wall of the Nexeus meets the Void, from the other side, and just fixed the broken outer wall of the world. Samuel and Belphegor would lose their shit. Also, if she brought the Beast with her, morphed into a scary-looking humanoid, Samuel would really lose his shit. 🙂

A return of Samuel to her school, this time under his real name, in order to explain the Corruption and other historical facts, might also be interesting to see.

Helena meeting Salvos now that everybody knows, and after Salvos solved the Belzu problem that was a point of contention between them, might be interesting. You see, they both knew that Belzu will end up betraying them to who knows what end, and Helena was very unhappy about that alliance; however, when Belzu did betray them, Salvos herself killed him, tying that loose end. Also, Helena will feel quite guilty for her own role in distrusting Salvos despite the fact that she ended up saving them all and warning them about the Corruption and all that. Knowing that Salvos’ father is the First King of the Netherworld, and that two powerful Demons actually conspired incognito in order to warn them of the true danger, teach them proper space magic, and defeat the invasion of Regnorex, will lead to an understanding that Humanity owes them big time. I wonder how they’ll deal with that.

When Soli is revealed to be the main antagonist, the Humans won’t take that well. There’s going to be a serious shit show regarding that. They’ve been indoctrinated for ages into thinking the Spirit Lord is some kind of a transcendental God figure – rather than the Arcraem. They’ll have quite a bit of a hard time accepting the truth, or dealing with it. Also, if the Nexeus can’t be saved, the evacuation will be hasty and messy.

I wonder if Hartia will manage to fix his relationship with the Fairies; there is a hint that Fairy Queen’s misguided attempt to create that separate world will fail catastrophically, and likely kill them all, which might make Hartia the sole survivor of his species. However, he might in some way save them all when that world starts crumbling, showing them that the Fairy Queen and not himself was the true problem all along. In any case, there’s a story arc there and I wonder how it’s going to be resolved. Also, Salvos meeting Lily as a lvl. 200 God might be funny, especially if Lily still didn’t learn how to travel between the planes. 🙂

Manos was deliberately written ambiguously. Salvos trusts him because she saw that he’s drowning under the burden of all the deaths he caused, and he desires salvation from it all. She interprets it as his desire to get away from Regnorex. However, since “salvation” is something Regnorex keeps talking about, there might be a double meaning there, and how Manos ends up resolving his problem remains an open question.

Is there anything else I forgot? Probably. Willy is going to evolve soon, since he’s close to lvl. 150. Edithe will have to advance her class since her level is likely going to explode from the integration with the Archangel, and the experience of killing Matriarch Centinel, and, likely, the Archangel himself. That’s going to be weird and I can’t even guess where it goes. Also, the Arcraem might have a say in her Class options. Centina, too, is very close to evolving to Ancient Centinel, and since she’s trying to become as humanoid as possible, her evolution might be something to see. Also, she and Clayton got quite close, although not as close as she would like. I wonder what’s with that. Valda watched Sally die defending them. That must have left quite an impression. Also, all those bigoted staff members in the Mavos Academy are going to be a problem sooner rather than later, since that Dreaded Goblet is going to be an endpoint for a portal Salvos is likely to create, and when she brings a dozen Demons of extreme levels with her, that’s going to be quite something. Also, since there is an Elven invasion in progress, Salvos might bring their Matriarch to the summit, along with some Kobolds. She’s not taking sides there, despite Humans being too willing to have a war with everybody. Although, after the Demon invasion, Elven invasion and possibly a Kobold invasion, I think they might be somewhat done with war.

Salvos is defined as a Demon of Pride, pride being her sin, because Demons of Nexeus have their sin unlocked at lvl. 70. Other sins are obviously greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth and lust. Those don’t actually work the way you would expect; for instance, rather than being slaves to their sins, they seem to use them to their advantage. A Demon of Sloth would find strength in solid things and rest, and be empowered by having others do most of the work. A Demon of Wrath reflects other people’s anger back at them, and manages to be the calm centre of a storm that provokes others to wrath in order to enslave and destroy them. So, it isn’t as trivial as one would think; also, someone like Belphegor seems to be a Primordial Demon of Sloth, which is visible from the fact that he creates Gargoyles and Golems made of rock to assist him, finding a source of strength in firm, solid things. Also, he seems to move extremely slowly, and yet somehow fast at the same time. But rather than being lazy, as one would expect, he’s merely incredibly steady, reliable and persistent, the way a mountain is. He keeps doing his terrible duty in a dark pit of doom, living in his memories and pain, but never letting go or giving up. I find him the most admirable and virtuous person in all of “Salvos” world. So, the “sins” of Demons are not what you would expect. Rather, “sloth” might be merely a different word for “diligence” and “persistence”, when it exists in the uppermost part of its spectrum. Likewise, Salvos’ “pride” exists in a spectrum – from hubris, arrogance and cockiness at the lower end, to pride of achievement that motivates great deeds, and, ultimately, pure love that is pride of seeing the loved ones thrive and succeed. The realistic part of it is that the entirety of this spectrum seems to exist at some point or another, and she never seems to completely lose the lower end; she is always prone to hubris, cockiness and arrogance, at least to some degree, but as she evolves as a person, the higher end of the spectrum seems to be present to a greater extent.

Also, what makes her character admirable is the fact that her pride is tempered by strategic wisdom, especially when she’s calm and thinks about what to do next and how to approach it. When she’s in a fight, she’s more likely to fall victim to the more shallow and stupid aspects of pridefulness, creating a tunnel vision that often gets her stuck in situations where she started fighting an enemy she can’t beat, uses up most of her resources and ends up in a “now what?” scenario.

However, in the last few books, it is very hard to say that pride is her primary motivator. Let’s see what she does – she helps Haec in his rebellion against Regnorex, because she loves him and feels protective. She also feels duty and responsibility because she was forced to leave him alone to fend for himself in that terrible place when she fell into a portal, and now she tries to make it up to him. Sure, she’s proud of being strong and being able to do it, but that feels very much secondary; the primary motives are love, responsibility and duty. She also wants to become strong, the strongest in the Nexeus, partly because of her pride, but partly in response to her father’s goading. There is, however, the important aspect of it that is strategic – she knows the world is doomed and everything she loves will be taken away from her if she’s too weak to do something about it, and this also drives her actions to a great extent. Currently, she feels that everybody in the Mortal Realm is in mortal danger from Regnorex, and she wants to deal with him in order to save and protect her friends and companions – again, the main motive is protective love and, to a point, possessiveness over the things she loves. You can say that her approach is egotistical, but you can’t say it’s wrong or sinful.

Unlike Haec, who is an idiot, and who would charge into a fight he can’t possibly win, Salvos is smart enough to understand that she has no strategy, no tactics and no plan that makes any kind of sense. Her strategic sense is telling her that she had tied herself to a train that’s heading to a straight cliff at full speed. Tactically, she’s exhausted, injured and emotionally traumatised by two very close wins that could have very easily ended differently, and she became aware that her allies are something completely different than what she came to expect in the Mortal Realm, and now she’s even questioning whether she forgot to be a Demon and what it even means.

The obvious answer she will likely come up with is that she was born a Demon by accident, but everything else she accomplished was by choice. If that choice makes her more God than Demon, then so be it. She definitely doesn’t feel much like the modern Demons of Regnorex, but she would fit right in with the First Demon Kingdom of her father. So, it’s not necessarily that she doesn’t know how to be a Demon properly; rather, it’s that the other Demons fail to realise more than a fraction of their own potential. This is what Belzu realized when he was dying: he thought that to be a Demon is to be cruel, pragmatic, focused only on survival, but then he remembered his childhood, where the others were social, kind, and loving. They were all Demons, not Mortals he would later associate such qualities with. The fact that the environment creates a pressure of the kind that makes the kind and good ones less likely to survive doesn’t make them any less of a Demon; it just means that in a different environment, they could be a completely different people.

Manos told her that she forgot how to be a Demon properly because she lived with the Mortals. He believes it, and she thinks there’s something to it, as well. However, what she needs to realise is that this very Manos is looking for a salvation from the terrible nightmare the Netherworld has been beating him into, and that the way out looks like Salvos. She’s the example of what a Demon can become if she’s surrounded by a different environment. She developed more sophisticated emotions, behavioural patterns and worldview. She’s not less of a Demon, but she’s a better, more rounded person, while the Demons of Netherworld look stunted and collimated into an unidirectional ray of violence and survival.

Also, since she unlocked her sin, she made being a Demon of Pride into a thing to be proud of, because it’s her, and since it’s her it must be great, because she’s Salvos and she’s great. Is it, however? At her lvl. 150 evolution, she already had to face the same problem, and she solved it by stating that she’s proud of being a Demon, but she’s also proud of having become more.

So, considering how little she has been motivated by pride, and how much it evolved into protective love, I wonder if she’ll get an evolution that reflects that, at 200. We know that the Devil “no longer bears the same sin”, since the fall. Something happened to him and he’s no longer a Primordial Demon of Pride – rather, it turned into despondency or depression, which might turn out to be a possibility; or is it regret and guilt? We know that she already has features that resemble those of Spirits – the angelic wings, for instance; purely Demonic features could no longer hold her evolutionary choices. Haec got an evolution that gave him a second sin, so he’s now a Primeval Demon of Lust and Wrath. It stands to reason that Salvos could be a Primordial Demon of Love and Pride, or something like that; or, that she would have an evolution of both her Species – a Demon, and a God. If her Demon-self is prideful, her God-self is protective, caring and loving. Those things often blend together into something indistinguishable, but still, the fact remains that she has a second subspecies of Lesser God, and this subspecies is likely to evolve at 200. Also, she’s nearing the evolution of her Class at 200, and this one is possibly even more interesting, since it’s currently dominated by Corruption, but one of the options she couldn’t accept without dying used to belong to the Fairy Queen – “The Forerunner of Space and Time”. Even that fact alone makes Salvos extremely impressive, because it means she’s following in the footsteps of the most significant people in the history of the world. If she manages to overcome the Corruption, what would her Class become? Obviously, it will involve absolute mastery of Space Magic, space travel, space creation and Worldwalking. Her current abilities encompass Space Magic at the level of a Fairy Queen’s Architect, Corruption manipulation and control at a level below that of the Matriarch Centinel, but above anyone else we know of, Divine Nebular Creation, Soul Magic, and so on. Her soul-vector is a specific combination of Pride and Love, where both were always present, but at this point in her character development I would say that Pride is definitely a secondary feature. In fact, her behavioural pattern indicates emotional regression due to traumatic stress, anxiety and deprivation of the sophisticated emotional spectrum she got accustomed to with her Mortal companions, and Pride is hardly a factor at all. The place Melas left her at is one where she needs to know herself, understand what she is, what she wants, and then proceed from a place of clarity. Then, Manos needs to hear an answer to his claim; no, she didn’t forget what it means to be a Demon. She’s merely something Demons can become, if they choose to, and “salvation” is not a place, the way Regnorex seems to think. It’s a choice of a mode of being.

The entire “Salvos” series looks like a collection of post-modernist literary tropes, in a sense that everything is inverted. The protagonist is a Demon, the main antagonists resemble God and Church. Male characters look like they can’t tie their shoelaces without a “strong independent woman” showing them the way. The Hero is a confused, cowardly stereotype of a gen-z American college student whose girlfriend died in an accident doing something heroic and then he got depressed and wasted his life away, after which he got whisked into the Nexeus to fill the role of a Hero. People who are heroically trying to do “the right thing” invariably cause a mess and get themselves in a situation they shouldn’t have been in. It all looks like some kind of a literary form the author seems to be compelled to use, probably because he thinks his audience won’t buy it if it isn’t “edgy” enough, but the problem is, this form is so overused, it doesn’t feel edgy. It feels like a collection of foolish prejudice shared by children who haven’t read a single book that isn’t manga or something of that sort. For instance, the trope about the Christians and the Church as the nefarious bad guys pretending to be good originates from the propaganda that was spread by the Tokugawa shogunate since 1614, in a great persecution of the Catholic Church in Japan. Essentially, it’s propaganda that was spread by the actual villains, and it became part of the popular culture in Japan, and as such became a trope in anime and manga.

Also, the trope of casting the protagonists and strong characters as female is probably seen as sexy in the beta-male circles where they just want their mommy to take care of things because the world is hard and they are sad and depressed and their testosterone levels are insufficient for detection on the blood tests. So, the typical male and female roles are reversed, and to Melas’ credit, he makes characters work as people, except in case of Lofus the Broken Berserker, which is an extreme caricature of a boisterous hyper-masculine character that was cast as female, and it doesn’t work at all. However, other female characters work and feel like actual normal people, and there are no “Mary Sue” female characters who are magically great at everything because girl power. The female characters need to work for everything just like everybody else, and since magic is a major structural element of the world, sexual dimorphism doesn’t make the whole thing ridiculous the way it would here.

The reason why the whole thing works so well is that the initial setup creates a certain set of expectations, by setting the stage with the ridiculous set of supposedly subversive tropes, which makes you think you’re in for typical post-modernist deconstructionist nonsense, and then the author manages to completely subvert those expectations by creating a meritocratic world where neo-marxist tropes about species and groups within the world being neatly divided into oppressors and the oppressed fly straight into a brick wall. In fact, the typical collectivist ideas about saving the world and treating people as members of groups and categories rather than the individuals that they are, are put straight into the mouths of the greatest villains. Regnorex presents himself as offering salvation to Demonkind, leaving a trail of dead bodies and ashes behind him; he just gets all his followers killed, along with everybody else. Belzu, who killed millions and razed entire countries in the Human Lands also presents himself as a saviour of Demonkind from Regnorex and his rule. He also just gets everybody killed and manifests terrible evils in the world. The Spirit Lord has a grand plan of salvation, spanning millennia, and he seems to be the arch-villain of the series, bad enough that the Arcraem sent its Ordained Judge, the Archangel, to kill him. The Kobold sects who just fanatically kill everyone all think they are saving the world by doing it, and they think in strict categories. Even outside the series but still within the “Deltaverse”, Galgom the Tyrant of Utana presents himself as a saviour of that world, and Idu, the arch-villain of the Multiverse who destroyed countless worlds presents himself as the saviour of the Multiverse. It appears that every single psychotic mass-murderer sees himself as implementing a grand plan of salvation, while seeing people merely as members of categories, and never as individuals.

On the other hand, Salvos sees only individuals, to a fault; she literally has a problem understanding the abstract categories and their importance. She will save the world by accident, by simply wanting to save the dozen people she loves and the environment they need in order to exist. She has none of the neo-marxist traits of seeing the world through simplified groups of oppressors and the oppressed. In fact, the Humans are, as a group, absolutely the most hostile towards her of all she met in the entire world, and yet most of her beloved companions are Humans. They all start by wanting to kill her, then changing their minds, and eventually growing to love her. There is a wide pattern of the redemptive power of love and a good personal example that overcomes ingrained prejudice – for instance, the Vampires are indoctrinated into hating Demons for untold centuries, and yet, Salvos created such a strong personal example of goodness and kindness towards them, that for instance Saffron becomes her close friend and companion, and Hadrian has a crisis of worldview resulting in accepting Salvos, while Mons uses her connections and wealth to publish a truthful biography of Salvos while she’s absent. In essence, the characters from deeply prejudiced and judgmental groups are showed as actual people who can change their minds and be convinced by reason and evidence, rather than remaining mere vehicles for a trope about bigoted Nazis.

Even the members of the Temples and the Council of Cremont, which is built up as an antagonist in the series, serving the interests of the Spirit Lord and subverting the Arcraem, which uses nefarious means such as summoning Willy to pretend to be a deity in the temples where his job was to shine brightly and look ethereal, so that the people would pray to him as a God, although he as a material being couldn’t hear their prayers and wasn’t what they think he was, until he was so bored he almost went mad; even the Summoners and the Priests of those Temples are portrayed as good people who genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, except for a few at the top of the hierarchy who seem to be outright evil and utterly corrupt. Edithe, for instance, is shown to have been completely brainwashed by the Church where she grew up as a child, and defaults to their formulaic thinking, but she is gradually forced to question and revise those beliefs as actual life happens. For instance, she starts by being a formulaic brainwashed character who attacks Salvos and accuses her of all kinds of nonsense, and eventually grows to understand that Salvos is nothing like her expectations of what a Demon is supposed to be. She also initially annoys Willy with her formulaic approach to him as a Grand Spirit, reminding him of all those people in the Temples who saw him as a mere prop for their choreography. Slowly, as she lets go of that nonsense, he warms to her and they form a working partnership based on mutual respect. He knows she had to stop being a Summoner because she broke her vows, just like he did, but only later does he learn what she actually did – she broke her vow in order to save her Spirit and sacrifice her own life, and was only saved because Salvos arrived in the nick of time. When they met Druma in the Spirit Plane, Willy was shocked to learn that he sees Edithe with such respect that he willingly disobeys the Spirit Lord in order to help her. So, basically, people who are a part of the Temple brainwashing scheme instigated by the Spirit Lord aren’t portrayed as generic elements of some abusive class of villains; there is great complexity, with good people being part of evil schemes, and people adhering to beliefs often quite formally, where their personal choices go against them, and they don’t even bother to make everything consistent and logical, which makes the whole thing seem very realistic. The over-arching pattern that the evil people always rationalize their evil with some great good they are supposedly doing and which never actually happens, while the good people save the world mostly by accident, doing one good deed and making one good decision at a time, is obvious and unavoidable. Also, Salvos beats the prejudice against Demons that troubles her greatly not by whining about it in some theatre of victimhood, but by slowly building a reputation of such magnitude, that the evidence breaks all but the most villainous of the bigoted minds. You just can’t ignore the fact that she leaves the trail of goodness behind her, and that the best and the most virtuous people in the world tend to form her closest friend group. When the truth about her becomes known, the greatest shock is the revelation of how many people actually knew her secret and protected it, and how many members of that group were the supposed sworn enemies of Demons.

Maybe the most shocking aspect of Salvos’ character is her ability to completely ignore one’s past actions and offer forgiveness if a person truly changes. In case of people like Daniel and Edithe, who initially wanted to kill her, and she gradually converted them into friends for life, this is still something one would find reasonable, but she also offers the same option to someone like Belzu, treating him like an individual person with a name, a personal worldview and emotions, and never thinking of him as a thing, the way Humans do, calling him “it”, or Primeval Demon, never bothering to learn his name, let alone his reasons; then it becomes shocking. She has a profound, intimate conversation with him even while he forces her to kill him, and they continue to talk about the differences in their beliefs while he’s dying. It feels incredibly personal, and I don’t think Humans are capable of doing something like that; to kill someone without depersonalising them, trying to see them as a thing so that they could destroy it. There is deep respect there between the two enemies, of the kind that reminds me of the Star Wars cartoons where Obi Wan mortally wounds Maul in a duel, and then holds him in his arms and talks to him while he dies. But it isn’t consistent – for the most part, she just destroys her enemies without giving them much thought. Also, she offers forgiveness and amnesty to the Deathsquad Hunters, to Hartia the sadistic murderous general of Regnorex, and Manos the Executioner. Haec, her brother who was raised in the service of Regnorex, is vindictive and can’t easily let go of his resentment; for instance, he wants Hartia killed for what he’s done, and is annoyed when Salvos forgives him. This is particularly jarring when we know that Haec is personally responsible for all kinds of terrible evils. His full name is Haec the Tormentor, and one can assume that he didn’t get that name by being nice to his fellow Demons. Salvos, on the other hand, is known as Secely’s Sentinel. Haec personally trained the Dukes and Duchesses of the Netherworld, who were sent to the Mortal Realm to spread chaos and destruction – Ira, for instance, committed one of the worst crimes of the whole war, where he sacrificed all the students and staff of the Cedric Academy to summon more Demons. Ira, as well as his colleagues, was stopped by Salvos. Where Salvos left a trail of protection and kindness, Haec left a trail of murder and havoc, and yet, he is unwilling to forgive others who did no worse than himself.

This is a profoundly Christian element of the story – a sinner who is willing to cast stones at other sinners, not seeing a log in his own eye while condemning a speck in another’s eye. Salvos, on the other hand, offers true forgiveness to those who accept her ways and truly change. However, what makes it particularly believable is that she isn’t consistent, and she doesn’t make it into a worldview. It’s mostly the result of how Truth Divination affects her, making her see directly into another person, which is then no longer something on the outside. She talks a lot about always being Salvos and not changing, but she changes and evolves and becomes much more than she initially was, but she also has regressions and relapses into old patterns, which makes the character incredibly relatable and alive.

Also, what makes Salvos feel alive and genuine is that she doesn’t conform to the trope of a good person who is, essentially, an inert victim. She has the innate core of warrior savagery that activates when she fights, and she’s able to make it coexist seamlessly with protective gentleness, often at the same time, without being either lost in her murderous rage and having it consume her, or being softened by her kindness into inability to respond effectively to threats. She’s the counter-example to the Star Wars trope of being lost to the Dark Side once you use it in a fight; to Salvos, this is not a thing. To her, the warrior savagery is merely what it takes if you want to protect those you love from threats. In the same fight, she can protect Hartia with incredible gentleness, and savagely destroy Jofis the Winged Horror in every way imaginable. To her, there is no contradiction. The sword is a shield. To her, there is no dichotomy of means; no “light” and “dark” use of force. Violence gains moral character from the way you use it, and has none of its own.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Well, apparently nobody in the “Salvos” world got the memo, which makes the world so convincing and believable.

The Humans are the most ignorant of all major species, it seems, since they have a wrong understanding of Demons, Elves, Kobolds, and Spirits. They think Demons all follow Regnorex, and that he rules the entirety of the Netherworld, while in fact he rules an area a thousand miles across, making it the size of the Motharis mountain range. They didn’t know that wild demons are a thing until Salvos told them. They don’t know anything about history – nothing about the Worldwalkers, nothing about the state of the Nexeus of old, almost nothing about space travel, nothing about the Dragons, about the Kobold lore, nothing about why the Elves attack them periodically, and nothing about the Corruption. They think the Spirits are some kinds of spiritual entities you pray to, while they are merely material entities similar to the Demons; they think the Spirit Lord is some kind of a God and pray to him, and they know nothing about the Arcraem.

The worst problem is that they would never admit that they don’t know those things. They have their misapprehensions and they hold on to them with incredible force.

The Demons are hardly any better. The Vanguard of Regnorex, the 100 Primeval Demons, know that the mortals wear clothes, but they don’t know why or how, so they wear pants on their heads and so on. They don’t know that there was a Kingdom before Regnorex, in the ancient times, or that the Devil used to be the King of all Netherworld. They don’t know that there are sub-surface layers of the Netherworld, or that there is Corruption, or how it came to be.

The Fairies seem to know more, which is logical since the Fairy Queen was there when Trico deceived them all and broke the world. The Spirit Lord knows all about the Corruption, and has measures to deal with it in the Spirit Plane. Unlike what the Humans think of him, he seems to be a calculated, self-serving bastard, who has been condemned by the Arcraem and unsuccessfully confronted by the Archangel, and I suspect him to be Trico himself, but I don’t have strong evidence for that. In any case, the System identifies the Spirit Lord, also known as Soli, as the arch-villain, and the supreme danger that will result in the destruction of the Nexeus and the death of the Arcraem if not stopped.

In any case, the fact that you get the feeling of deep history, that’s mostly forgotten, and almost everybody has distorted or outright wrong ideas about everything, makes the whole thing look like an actual, old world, with actual civilizations that inhabit it and interact mostly from the position of ignorance. If everybody knew everything and everybody was on the same page of every story, the whole thing would look completely fake and implausible.

So, the Humans think their problem are the invading Elves and Demons. The Kobolds think their problem are the humans who are causing the end of the world with summonings. Salvos thinks the problems are the Corruption and the sacrificial ritual of Regnorex which is likely to break the world completely. The Archangel thinks the problem is the Spirit Lord, because he received the orders from the Arcraem to that effect. So, it seems that only Salvos and the Archangel seem to be on the same page, but neither of them knows the whole truth, or the Archangel would be in the Netherworld dealing with the problem. Also, it seems that the Arcraem is placing Salvos, probably by focusing the timelines so that she can be the right person at the right place at the right time with the right knowledge. The funniest of all is that the Archangel looked completely insane before we got enough information to figure out that he just knows ten times more stuff than anyone else, and that he and the Spirit Lord are on the same page while everybody else is completely ignorant of anything important.

I can’t help but try to imagine how people will react once they are clued in. We can surmise part of it from the level of incredulity of the Human Elites when Salvos explained what she knew about the Corruption, the Kobold lore, the Dragons and the Worldwalkers. Someone who actually knows stuff can look crazy, and that, too, is why the world feels credible. Basically, nobody knows who they are, why they are there, who their enemy is, and who their supposed allies are. In such a situation, their survival is accidental.