There’s an important part of the “Salvos” story that is easy to overlook, simply because it isn’t there.

You see, it’s easy to see Salvos as superior to other characters in the story because she doesn’t struggle anywhere near as much as they do. However, it’s a good question if she would have done anywhere near as well if she had their problems.

For instance, Daniel experienced catastrophic emotional loss on Earth when his girlfriend died. His entire life collapsed, and then he got whisked away into another world, where he was deceived and manipulated by his summoners, adding another layer of emotional trauma.

Edithe got her entire team killed, including her lover Paul. It was literally her mistake – she got cocky, she led them into a fight with Lucerna, and they all died, mostly saving her. That was in addition to her childhood as a child of a nameless prostitute who got sick and died and she ended up being raised by a temple priest.

Willy was used as a temple prop for centuries, and when he actually started living for real, his Cyclops friend got a brilliant idea of going into the Bloodied Gulf, where she got killed protecting him from the Centinels, and he got stuck there, depressed.

Rachel was an unwanted child of divorced parents in a violent marriage and her father sold her to the cultists to be used as human sacrifice.

The Devil was an absolutely brilliant person, at least Salvos’ equal, who created the first Demon Kingdom, which remains the best system of government Demons ever had. He was betrayed by his mentor of 1000 years, and the result was the catastrophic collapse of the structure of the world, and the fall of his kingdom, which completely broke his heart.

Hartia was a nice Fairy who specialised in space magic and became Fairy Queen’s architect. He had a girlfriend Ivory, who was everything to him since they were children. He made a mistake with construction of Realityspace, it broke into corruption, and the entire structure of a new world collapsed, killing tens of thousands of Fairies, including his girlfriend and a mentor he greatly admired, Lotus. After that, the Fairy Queen blamed him and attempted to execute him by throwing him into the void, which he survived being a skilled space mage, but his heart broke and he never recovered.

It’s easy for Salvos to look good in comparison. She never lost a companion. She never experienced true betrayal. She didn’t make a terrible mistake that caused deaths of important people in her life. The worst things that happened to her were separation from Haec, which was honestly the best thing that could have happened to her, and the fact that she was surrounded by Humans who hate Demons and she felt unaccepted. Imagine a situation where she led her companions into Plaguelands, and they both died to the Lich, and she had to escape, defeated and in disgrace. Any of the close calls could have ended like that. She could have gotten people killed with her cockiness and lack of proper planning. That she didn’t is more due to luck than anything else, but she always takes the credit for it. Rachel imitated this attitude, and she got Sally killed. Salvos’ plans don’t always end well. She got two Legions killed, around 200000 Demons, when she freed them from their commanders, and they were caught in transit by Jofis; her clones were not powerful enough to protect them, and Jofis killed them all instantly. To her, it wasn’t very important because she didn’t know them and they were merely peripheral characters. However, her plans could as easily have ended badly for people who actually matter to her. I think she lacks the maturity necessary to understand the gravity of consequences.

The purport, I guess, is that it’s easy to look awesome when your burden is light. She looks at her troubled friends and it’s easy for her to see ways where they should get their shit together. However, would she even be able to survive being in their place? For instance, that she got Edithe and Daniel killed the way Edithe got her team killed? That she got Haec killed by straying into Lucerna’s territory, instead of merely getting him captured? Would she be able to shrug that off? I don’t think so, and I think she can thank good fortune for that, because I don’t think she would be able to make so much progress in such a short time. That’s why I consider Belphegor a much more virtuous person than Salvos. He experienced terrible personal loss. His kingdom fell, his world broke, his partner went insane, and it was partially his fault, because he felt something was off and he didn’t stop it. However, he spent 50000 years trying to contain the damage in hope that he will be able to buy enough time for things to be set right at some point in the future, and even without hope, in total despair, he still works, incessantly. Salvos almost fell apart feeling some of his pain in Truth Divination. He continued where everybody else would have either given up or died.

Everybody compares Daniel to the likes of Alexander and Melissa, but never in their formative years, only at their peak. He always falls short in those utterly unfair comparisons, but he matched Salvos in her growth. In some five years, he went from level 16 to 181, and is currently the second highest levelled Human, after the Watcher who’s been around for a century or so. For someone who keeps trying to find reasons to keep going, one day at a time, he’s doing incredibly well. Edithe, too, after having emotionally recovered from her first disaster, then having lost the ability to summon and ending up stranded in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, having to re-invent herself by fighting up-hill battles as the weakest of the three companions, always feeling like the weak link, she became a legendary person in her company, one of the most famous people in the world, and now she’s integrated with the Archangel which initially had a huge probability of ending terribly for her, and now she might actually and up being one of the highest levelled people in the world. It is true that this is largely to Salvos’ credit, since she pulled them out of the gutter and helped them realise their potential with her combination of optimism and risk-taking, but considering how emotionally wounded they were, and how Salvos wasn’t, the fact that they managed to keep up is fascinating. Basically, it’s like comparing a healthy unburdened person with someone wounded and carrying a sack of cement, and the burdened wounded person almost keeps up. That makes them incredibly admirable. Having in mind that Daniel is lost in a foreign world, after his girlfriend died, his life broke apart, and he was friend-zoned by Salvos who is his love interest, and he still managed to reach lvl. 181 by merely gnashing his teeth and living in memories, that makes him actually more admirable, not less. Also, he is being compared to a legendary God King who lived for at least a thousand years, and he’s approaching his level in the first ten years or so of being there.

Apparently, it’s all relative.

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.