a littl drunk

iv'e been out at the eolian drikning with SImmon and Willem and i have some things tos ay

the chandrian are REAL, i know because i SAW them, htey killd my family and i saw them do it

the main guy in th emiddle was calld Haliax nd he said my parents were "singing the entire wrong songs!" and my dad was workin on a song abuot the chandrin and he said he had a break through about the story right before he died

But my dad was real secretave so he didnt tell nyone about what was in the song so i don't know what he found out but it must have been REALLY IMPORTANT becuase the chandrian killed him for it

Haliax, leader of the chandrian

I DID IT!!!

Yesterday I called the name of the wind, and on none other than Ambrose Jackis!

He deserved it too, the slimy rat. He stole and subsequently shattered my lute, my one and only possession in this world, the only thing I own worth any money, and one of my only true friends right now. I got so angry that I just shouted the first thing that came to my head and the next thing I knew Ambrose was on the ground and leaves were blowing everywhere. Then I passed out and when I came to Elodin was whispering something in my ear.

I'm being brought to the horns soon over malfeasance. I'm not sure what will happen. To be completely truthful it was an accident, although I don't regret it a bit. The only thing that has stopped Ambrose and I from killing each other thus far has been possible expulsion. Honestly I don't think I'll be expelled, because I have Elodin, Elxa Dal, the Chancellor and Kilvin on my side, and the only headmasters who really want to see me gone are Hemme and Brandeur, and maybe Lorren but he's impossible to read sometimes. Hopefully I can get them to make Ambrose pay for a new lute though, I feel naked without it.

--Kvothe

I now know the name of the wind, and thus I have mastery over it. I'm like the next Taborlin the Great

The Rumor Mill: Part 2

1. Master Elodin threw me off the roof of the Haven
   Well. This one is interesting because what actually happened is significantly crazier than what the rumor says. The rumor is that Elodin and I were having a fight which ended in him throwing me off the roof. Some say we were having a heated verbal debate, others say I barely said anything and Elodin just snapped, others still say we did battle like Taborlin the Great, calling lightning and fire down from the sky, until I was finally bested by the one and only Master Namer.
   What actually happened is I wanted him to teach me naming, he said no, we walked through his old room at the Haven (which he somehow escaped from, again), we found ourselves on the roof, he looked me in the eye and said "Kvothe, step off the roof," and I stepped off the roof.
   No, he didn't hypnotize me.
   He didn't push me.
   He didn't even touch me.
   I thought he would demonstrate his naming prowess by calling the wind or something to catch me.
   He didn't.
   I'm an idiot.
   But apparently I'm a durable idiot, seeing as I only got out with a broken arm.
2. I killed two assassins by calling lightning down on them
   I wish! They were just two thugs meant to beat me up (I think, they might have been trying to kill me but I hope not). All I did was, I had some magnesium in my pocket from my work in the Fishery making sympathy lamps, so I threw it at them and lit it on fire in midair using sympathy, and the flash blinded them.
   The scary thing is they had a dowsing compass to find me. If you didn't already know, a dowsing compass is like a mommet but instead of stabbing it with needles to kill someone it just points you in their direction. The point is these thugs were idiots, but they had assistance from a skilled arcanist.
   I think it was Ambrose. I wouldn't put it past him to overreact like that.
3. I ran through a massive fire in the Fishery to save Fela
   This one is true and I'm damn proud of myself for it. There was a chemical spill and it caused a MASSIVE fire, and Fela almost died, but I saved her. Lost my eyebrows for it though.
4. Fela repaid me in the way only a woman can
   This rumor is more ridiculous than the one where I'm half demon. Fela would never do that and whoever started this should feel ashamed of themselves.
5. I won my pipes at the Eolian using a broken lute
   This is half true, one of the strings broke while I was playing "The Lay of Sir Savien Traliard." Let me tell you, that hard is already extremely difficult with a working lute, let alone a lute missing a string. And you know what, I still made the audience cry during the last verse.

Okay, that's all the major ones circulating now. Feel free to start crazy rumors about me, I kind of enjoy dispelling them.

--Kvothe

The Eolian, the finest music bar in all the four corners of civilization

Where I came from, part 3

I feel I've thoroughly answered why I'm here, but people have been wondering as to the logistics of how I got here.

After about 4 years in Tarbean, I sold all the worldy possessions I had accrued over the course of my stay and set out for Imre on a caravan. (I'm not going to sugar coat it, I stole most of it. I did what I had to do to survive.) It was on that caravan that I met Denna, the girl I mentioned earlier in the blog.

And at long last, I was at the University. The parts of my story that I care to talk about aren't that exciting, and the parts that are exciting I don't care to talk about, so we'll just leave it at that.

The real story of the Demon in Trebon

Sorry to burst your bubble but it wasn't a demon, it wasn't a dragon, and it wasn't a monster. It was, however, extremely dangerous nonetheless, and I was, in fact, the person who averted the crisis. Here's what happened:

A Draccus is a very large lizard. Very, very large. About ten times the size of a normal human. They are herbivores. Their diet consists mainly of trees. Not leaves, mind you; whole trees. Draccuses do not chew their food. This should give you an idea of how massive they are.
While they do breathe fire, this is used for self defense and as a mating call. They often eat boulders to help grind up their food in their stomach, the same way smaller lizards eat sand or pebbles. They do not attack humans and are actually afraid of loud noises, which is ironic because their footsteps are deafening. They are only dangerous if threatened, and the main danger they present is not the fire they spew out their mouths, but their sheer mass. If a draccus steps on you, you are not surviving the encounter.
Please feel free to read more about them in the excelent book, "The Mating Habits of the Common Draccus." Great read.

Denner resin is a highly illegal, highly addictive substance that releases a euphoric feeling in those who have ingested it. Of course you already know all about sweet eaters, but just to recap, a sweet eater who hasn't had any denner resin will stop at nothing to acquire some, and if that means murdering you for pocket change, so be it.

In the forest bordering Trebon, a man was growing a denner orchard, as it were. He was processing and selling this resin on the black market.

The draccus that attacked Trebon had inadvertently eaten many denner trees while it was prowling the forest. It was, unfortunately, addicted, and it's tiny lizard brain was at least smart enough to understand that when it ate a particular kind of tree it got a particularly good feeling.

It eventually ran out of trees.

It went mildly insane during the withdrawal process.

And it attacked a small town.

Stopping it was no easy task. It involved complicated sympathy, baiting the draccus with more denner resin, and destroying a small Tehlin church. However, I live and die by my reputation, so I'll let you assume the details.

--Kvothe

Kvothe vs. the Draccus

The women at the University, ranked by attractiveness

DUE TO THE EXTREMELY NEGATIVE RECEPTION OF THIS I HAVE TAKEN DOWN MY LIST OF WOMEN. I APOLOGIZE TO ANYONE WHO WAS OFFENDED AND PLEASE STOP SLAPPING ME, I GET IT.

Where I came from, part 2

When I young, maybe 12 years old, my entire family was killed. My entire troupe, everyone I had ever known or loved up until that point.

I'm not going to talk about that.

For the next four years I lived on the streets of Tarbean scrounging for scraps of food and barely surviving. Winters were a nightmare and I almost froze to death several times. I saw the most horrific displays of human cruelty you can imagine and was lucky I survived the ordeal with my sanity.

I'm not going to talk about that either.

What I will talk about is a man named Skarpi, and how he is the direct cause of my being at the University now.

Skarpi was a man who told stories to street urchins in Tarbean. He told me the story of Lanre, which goes as thus:

Lanre was once a great warrior hero, but upon the death of his great love, Lyra, he became grief stricken and attempted to revive her as she had once done for him. Without the Naming ability Lyra possessed, he was unable to do so, so he set off on a quest to find a way to bring her back. He amassed great power in order to bring Lyra back, but was still unsuccessful. He resolved to die himself, and committed suicide, but the power he'd gathered to defy death proved a curse, preventing him from dying again.Mad with grief, Lanre laid waste to six out of mankind's seven greatest cities, either hoping that other powerful heroes would find a way to kill him or possibly just raging against the world. He bound Selitos with his strange new power, and forced him to watch as Myr Tariniel was destroyed, but for whatever reason did not kill his old friend.Some time later, Selitos cursed Lanre with darkness, shrouding his features until the stars fell "nameless from the sky." Thereafter, Lanre was known as Haliax, leader of the Chandrian.

Later he told me the story of the Amyr, right before he was incarcerated by Tehlin priests.

Don't bother telling me the Chandrian aren't real, and that this is just a story that isn't true. To put it in Skarpi's words, "All stories are true. But this one actually happened, if that's what you're asking." Believe me, anything you feel like saying to disuade me from my "crazy" pursuit of knowledge about the Chandrian or the Amyr, I guarantee I've already heard it. I know for a fact the Chandrian are real, the Amyr still exist, and the base reason that I'm at the university is to discover as much as I can about them; everything else is secondary.

Really, it's best not to ask.

--Kvothe

The Chandrian

The Amyr

Shameless advertising

I live and work at Anker's Inn, come see me play some time! The food is excellent, the mead is cheap, and he's the only innkeeper in Imre that didn't let Ambrose bribe him into rejecting me!

Addressing a criticism

In the first post I ever made on this blog I stated that I could teach the fundamentals of sympathy better than Master Hemme could ever dream to. I've been called out several times on this, saying I may be smart but Hemme has been teaching sympathy longer than I've been alive. I will now prove you all wrong by teaching the fundamentals of sympathy right now. New students: You're welcome.

However, a word of warning: Sympathy is dangerous. If you draw too much heat from your blood, you can catch what is known as binder's chills and you can die. If you try to move two much heat at one time and the overload is put into your body, you can die. I once tried to make a gust of wind binding the air in my lungs to the air outside, and I almost suffocated. If you only learn one thing from this blog, learn this: Sympathy is dangerous, and carelessness can get you killed.

Okay, onto the basics.

Sympathy is, basically, binding two things together through sheer force of will. It's easy to comprehend with physical objects; if you bind two twigs and lift one, the other lifts with it, if you light one on fire, the other gets hot, etc. The specifics of how this is done cannot be taught through text, but the essence of it can. There are four fundamental aspects of Sympathy that everyone should know off the top their head and in their sleep. They are:

1. The Law of Correspondance -- "Similarity enhances sympathy."
   What this basically means is, the more alike two things are, the more efficient the sympathetic link is. If you take the branch of a tree and break it in two, those two pieces of wood are very similar; they are roughly the same size, they are the same material, they even came from the same source. If you bind them, you will get a very strong link, say, 80% efficiency. On the other hand, if you take a piece of twine and a large iron ingot and try to bind them, you will get a truly terrible link. No part of the twine is even remotely similar to the ingot; the ingot is bigger, sturdier, heavier, and made of completely different material. You'd be lucky to get 5% efficiency.
2. The Principle of Consanguinity -- "A part can represent the whole."
   This is harder to understand than the law of correspondance but easier to explain. Basically, if I take a branch off a tree, and heat the branch, I can transfer that heat to the tree through a second binding. This is the same principle behind a mommet. A lock of your hair, or a drop of your blood, is used to represent you, which is then used to cause bodily hard to the target. Do not do this.
3. The Law of Conservation -- "Energy cannot be created nor destroyed."
   Remember earlier when I mentioned inefficient bonds? Now if you're a clever student, you've no doubt asked: What happens to all the energy that isn't transfered? Simply put, it is released into the air. Consider this: if you bind an iron drab to an iron drab and lift one, theoretically it would weigh the same as two iron drabs (although realistically you wouldn't have a perfect bond and it would weigh more). If you bind the twine to the iron ingot, a combined weight of about one tenth stone, and you try to lift it, it would probably feel like you were lifting about 10 stone of iron. The same waste in energy applies to all forms of energy, be it heat, light, or sound. The important thing to understand is that when you "lose" energy it's not gone, it's going into the air. This is also why sympathy is dangerous; if an inefficient heat transfer goes awry, the heat might not go into the air. It might go into you. There was an incident recently where a student tried to force open a door using sympathy and ripped his arm off because of the overflow of energy.
   
   Be careful.
4. The Alar -- "The riding-crop belief."
   This is the single most important aspect of sympathy. This is the force of will involved in binding two things. If you take Master Hemme's class he'll no doubt have you memorize all sorts of different Alars, and when you get started doing sympathy you'll ritualistically chant them under your breath every time you do even a simple binding, but that is all formality. The only truly important aspect of the Alar is the belief. To light a candle, all you must do is believe extremely hard that the candle is already lit. (I say that lightly but it's actually incredibly difficult and takes years of practice.)

And there you have it, the basics of sympathy. That's approximately 5 span of Hemme's classes, right there on the paper. Have fun wasting your time trying to impress him as you wonder desperately why he hasn't actually done any sympathy in class.

--Kvothe

This is a mommet. Don't make these, they are dangerous and can kill people and are highly illegal. 

Where I came from, part 1

A lot of people have been wondering where I'm from, and where I learned all my sympathy from (because it sure wasn't from Master Hemme, I'll tell you that much). A smaller number of people have also been wondering why I know all my sympathy, and furthermore why I'm at The University. This is a much more interesting question, because it only takes a sentence to explain "I learned sympathy from an arcanist named Abenthy."

So, Why is Kvothe the Bloodless enrolled at the University?

Abenthy taught me more than just simple sympathy. Sure, he taught me some critical thinking, some chemistry, some history, and more than a few dirty jokes. Most of all he taught me to love learning. But none of that is why I came to the university. No, Abenthy convinced me to come to the University completely by accident.

Abenthy knew the name of the wind.

I'm sure you've all heard the stories of Taborlin the Great, who knew the name of all things. He is in a room with no door, he speaks the name of stone, the wall parts into two. He walks off a cliff, speaks the name of the wind, the wind catches him and he floats safely to the ground. This is widely regarded as storybook magic, but as any self respecting student at this institution should know, naming is very real. (Why do you think we have a Master Namer? Although I'll be the first to admit, I doubt Elodin actually knows how to tie his shoes let alone the true names of anything. That man is completely insane.) Obviously it's exaggerated in the stories, but it is a very real thing. What happened was this:
Our troupe had just arrived in a small city. We were preparing to perform, and I, having no role in the upcoming performance, was wandering around the city near our caravan. It was then that I spotted what I assumed to be a tinker. I began to approach his cart when the captain of the watch began to harass the man and asked him to leave. It turned out he was an Arcanist, and he was making the townspeople nervous. Abenthy (although I didn't know him as such) was politely telling the captain he was merely selling goods when the captain began to get rough with him. And then, out of nowhere, it happened: Abenthy shouted something into the air and conjured up a small whirlwind which struck the captain to the ground. He wasn't hurt, but he was scared, and they left Abenthy alone after that.

I didn't need any convincing one way or the other. I knew at that moment that I wanted that kind of power. Abenthy joined our troupe that night and began teaching me sympathy on the road, and that's where my education began.

Alright that's all I'm writing right now. I'll finish this particular narative at a later date.

--Kvothe

Have you seen this girl?

I met this girl a while ago on a caravan, her name was Denna. We had some good conversations, and shared a few moments. Then we parted for what I thought would be for good. Then the other night we met again, and under very strange circumstances; She sang with me at the Eolian and helped me win my pipes. (For the uninitiated, "pipes" are just a badge that means I get free admission and can play there; no small feat, I assure you. Ambrose has been trying for years, haha).

I don't know why but I felt a really strong connection with her. It felt kind of like... You know in the winter a lake will freeze over? And you walk out onto the ice and the close to the middle you get the thinner the ice gets, and eventually it starts cracking under your feet. You look down and you see cracks expanding from the point you stepped on too hard and you know if you move even barely the whole ice could shatter under your feet.

I didn't feel like I was standing on thin ice. I felt like the ice itself.

But then she left and I can't seem to find her for the life of me. Has anyone seen her?

I did not provoke Ambrose Jackis

I'm starting this blog because rumors are flying all around the University about how I insulted the Jackis family name, and how I'm a thieving Ruh bastard, and how if you turn your back for a second your purse will be emptied and your women will be kidnapped.
Obviously if you've met me you know this is just an egregious lie. So allow me to address this lie, and all the other ridiculous rumors circulating about me, one by one:

1. I provoked Ambrose Jackis
   Okay this one is debatable, but I don't think I did anything to warrant the reaction he gave. Basically I walked into the Archives and saw Ambrose "serenading" this poor scriv, Fela, practically holding her in place. So I told him off, insulted his poetic meter, that kind of thing. Fela seemed pretty thankful and if you were there you would know that Ambrose was being a total jackass. So how does he thank me? He gets me banned from the Archives.
   But sure, I'm the one who instigated our rivalry.
   
2. I assaulted Master Hemme
   I did not assault him, he was never even in danger. If anything I gave him a minor burn on his big toe. Besides, he was asking for it! My first day at the University I asked him what it would take to get out of his basic sympathy class, and he said "Demonstrate your knowledge of the sympathetic arts." Then the next day he asks if I would like to teach the class in his stead. I'm sure he meant it as sardonically as possible but to be quite honest, I could teach that class and do a hell of a better job than he could. So naturally I say of course. Does Hemme back out? No, he invites me onto the podium to attempt to teach the class. Then, to top it all off, I asked for a strand of his hair, as I made a wax dummy of him, and he gave it to me. You do not have to be a skilled sympathist to know this is a bad idea. So I make a mommet out of him, put the mommet's foot in the candle, bind the candle to the furnace to increase the heat output, and give him at most a mild burn, and probably just some uncomfortable heatrash. But of course they take me in for disciplinary action and he claims I blistered him all over the leg, but he's somehow unable to show us the blisters. Of course you know the rest, but in case you've been living in a cave and haven't heard the news, I was given 5 lashes for "unbecoming conduct," but apparently my display was impressive so I was admitted to the Arcanum as well.
   
3. I did not bleed or cry when I was whipped
   This one's true, I neither bled nor cried when they gave me my lashes, hence the name, "Kvothe the Bloodless." I can hear your cries even now, "But Kvothe! How did you not bleed! I have to know!" Well that would ruin the mystery, wouldn't it?
   But then again, you're reading this blog for answers, so let me give you a hint: The reason I didn't bleed can be bought at any apothecary. I'll you to figure out the rest.
   
4. I'm half demon
   Well, this one has served as an explanation as to why I didn't cry out when I was whipped, and of course demons don't bleed. I've heard this rumor in many forms, anywhere from I'm a demon possessing a mortal body, to I ate a demon heart to gain its powers. As fun as it might be to tell you I'm a demon, no, I'm not a demon. Demons don't exist. They're faerie tales for superstitious farmers and housewives.
   
5. I'm a Ruh bastard
   Well, yes and no. I am Edema Ruh, I was born on the road, and I've been a trouper all my life. But I'm not a "Ruh bastard." No group of people have ever been so hated as the Edema Ruh, so allow me to clear up some stereotypes: We do not steal and kidnap when we perform in your towns, we are not highwaymen, we are not demonspawn. The Ruh are just people, and I'm one of them.

Okay, that's all for now but I'm sure other rumors will crop up. I'll address them as they happen.
--Kvothe the Bloodness