Elayne Kevarian’s God Wars
“You were a young woman once, and then you went to war.
Many years have passed since you fought—since you stalked through the rotting jungle, blade wet, since you hid in a muddy defile from searching angels, since you led the doomed and damned and dead through the wasteland game board you had made of someone else’s world. But you were young when you came to the ending trade, and its patterns and its habits shaped you. The war was over, people said. But your life contained it now, no matter how you might wish it otherwise.”
Elayne Kevarian is one of a handful of major characters in the Craft Sequence who lived – and fought – through the God Wars. This century of destruction raged across the entire Domain, starting in the Old World and later crossing the World Sea to the New.
Along with Temoc Almotil and the King in Red, Elayne is shaped by her experiences; unlike them, she committed to moving beyond the horrors. We see this contrast most in Last First Snow, where the three characters and their War traumas impact every aspect of the plot, their actions, and the failed Skittersill Rising; but it has shaped Elayne in every book and interaction.
As we discuss Last First Snow in our Countdown to Craft series, I wanted to do a dive into Elayne Kevarian’s God Wars. We know precious little, but what we are told paints a vibrant – and violent – story.
But first of all, let’s look at the God Wars as a whole. Or as whole as we can get in a single section of a single essay.
The God Wars
“War,” she said. “It sounds so normal, doesn’t it? So pretty.” That last word blighted the air as it left her throat. “A few bodies impaled on a few+ swords, some bright young boys skewered by arrows, and done. What we did, what was done to us, was not war. The sky opened and the earth rose. Water burned and fire flowed. The dead became weapons. The weapons came alive.”
Around 150 years before our story starts, Maestre Gerhardt developed the initial principles of the Craft; his first experiments left devastating scars on the world. The gods began to worry. And then they began to fight back. Thus began a century of the God Wars, a series of conflicts that spread country by country, culture by culture, until they engulfed the entire world.
The world broke, a little. Gods fought. Gods died. Believers rose up against anyone who seemed to be able to use the Craft, no matter how much danger they posed. Craftsfolk banded together, and their institutions took off into the sky to become The Hidden Schools and other flying universities. Craftsfolk developed new ways of using the power of the stars and of the soul, becoming godlike in their own ways. Generations were born, lived, and died in the Wars. Many fled the Old World for the New, only for the Wars to follow them.
From the timeline in the back of German editions of the series, we see that the God Wars occurred over almost exactly 100 years:
Maestre Gerhardt published ‘Das Thaumas’ in 1356, which started the Craft movement.
Three years later in 1359, we see the first purge of Craftsfolk in the Old World.
By 1363 we reach the siege of Alikand, creation of the God Wastes, and the God Wars more or less officially starting (according to general opinion).
Dresediel Lex falls in 1440.
In 1459, a century on from the first purge, “the last embers of war begin to cool.”
Starting in Alikand with Maestre Gerhardt and his followers, the God Wars quickly spread across the Old World – think Craft!Europe, Craft!Asia, and Craft!Africa. Northern Kath, where much of the Craft Sequence takes place, was ‘safe’ for the early decades, and became home to many refugees from the Old World, including Tara Abernathy’s forebears. But the Wars, inevitably, crossed the World Sea.
As we read in Dead Country:
“The Wars came, plural in grammar as they were plural in their theaters and combatants and battlefields, fought in so many ways in so many lands as alliances and social realities shifted. They lasted a century. A few brief stretches of not-quite-global peace broke out (though someone was always killing someone somewhere) while all the many sides circled like stags whose antlers just kept growing. But always the carnage began again. The Wars were polymorphously perverse. They infiltrated history from the root. To think you stood outside them was to stand at their heart. And for a very long time northern Kath had thought it stood outside.
But one day Kath realized the Wars were already here. By the time they turned hot each side held weapons honed by decades of conflict, weapons subtle and fierce beyond imagining.”
Horrific weapons were used on all sides. We’ve seen a few in the story proper: gripfire, liquid fire that burns anything it touches and seems to keep its victims alive for days; machines of war, piloted by Craftsfolk, raining destruction below; dying gods that worm into your brain and drive you mad; an aurora that melts sand into glass.
There is much more we haven’t seen. Perhaps we will as the Craft Wars ignite.
After decades of bloodshed, remaining gods signed peace agreements with their Craftsfolk enemies, some of whom were experimenting with immortality and leaving flesh and blood behind to become the first Deathless Kings. The Craft rose as the dominant power in the world, remaking institutions and governments and revolutionising the world until it was nearly unrecognisable from the one that came before.
How did Elayne Kevarian join the Wars?
“You fought for the King in Red?”
She nodded. “When I was not much older than you. I joined at thirteen.”
“That young,” Mina said.
“It was a different time. The good people of my hometown tried to kill me when they learned I’d taught myself the basics of Craft; I didn’t even know that what I did had a name. Lots of Craftworkers my age have similar stories, women especially. I ran away to the Hidden Schools—but they were under threat so often back then, I’d just as well have joined an artillery battalion. Soon I entered the fight in earnest.”
Elayne Kevarian, we read in the official timeline, was born in the latter half of the Wars, in 1423. Thus, she was born into an era defined by the battle between the gods and the Craft, even if the Wars were yet to officially begin in Northern Kath.
Like many Craftsfolk, Elayne discovered her abilities young. She describes teaching herself how to tickle trout at the age of five (not quite as exciting as Tara catching a fallen star in a storm, but impressive nonetheless). This became noticed around her village, but did not seem to immediately cause concern. We next hear about Elayne at the age of 12:
“[she] was a twelve-year-old girl hiding facedown in cave mud, breathing moss and muck as a mob poured past the cavern mouth, torches in their hands and whiskey on their breath. She tasted fear and bile and ice-cold anger. Run, she had to run, but could not—and wouldn’t it be better to crawl into the dark and remain, and grow a twisted thing twisted more by shadows?”
Elayne’s passing comment to Tara in Three Parts Dead that their work keeps them but one step ahead of the mob holds new resonance. Tara had to escape a mob at 24. Elayne was 12.
Elayne Kevarian keeps bad memories locked tight in her mind. What little we get to see tells only part of the story. We don’t know much about Elayne’s family. Did they help her hide, or were they part of the mob? Were they killed in her stead?
We also don’t know how she reached safety, only that she ran away to the Hidden Schools. She tells Mina that she joined the war at 13, and that the Hidden Schools were frequently under threat; it’s unclear if she is referring to war at the Schools at 13, or something else. The Schools can fly, after all. Were they a place of sanctuary and teaching back then, or mobile war camps?
She does appear to have left the Schools for the fight. When visiting the Skittersill protest camp, she reminisces about the camps of her youth:
“They moved among tents and throngs of protesters, some sleeping, some eating breakfast, some singing. A group of mostly men performed a martial exercise. Fathers cradled children. The place should have stunk but didn’t, thanks to neon-coloured alchemical toilets and—Elayne was shocked to note—to her own nostalgia. Odours of charcoal and desperation, sweat and hope, dirt and canvas and fear, evoked her youth, and the Wars, and not all those memories were bad. The camps were fun, for the most part. Pranks and drugs and sex and music and black magic relieved the tension of the battlefield.”
Elayne’s wars
We don’t have a precise timeline of Elayne’s wars, other than knowing she was at the Liberation of Dresediel Lex directly after the Semioticists’ Rebellion in Southern Kath. She was 17 at this point, and had been on the battlefield for four years. We get the most detail about these two events, so I’ll start by looking at other parts of her wars, though the specific order of events is not clear. Most of this information is, understandably, from Last First Snow, but we do get a little in Wicked Problems.
First, we hear that Elayne was “young and almost in love, in that vanishing breath between girlhood and the War” (Last First Snow, chapter 23). Not clear if this is before being chased from her home, or after reaching the Hidden Schools. We also don’t know who she was almost in love with; in Three Parts Dead we hear that she first met Denovo as a child (convenient, I think that should be retconned tbh) and he made her fall in love with her at some point (implied to be during the Seril case after the Wars). I don’t believe this reference to love means Denovo, nor a later one we’ll see. Denovo appears to be entirely separate from Elayne’s wars, bookending them in childhood and her first job at Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao.
We learn that Elayne made her first kill at fourteen, “with a simple steel knife in those days of sorcery, entering a man’s ribs again and again, the shock of his body’s weight through the steel as he bore her down” (LFS, chapter 61). Where this happened, we do not know. It could be the Hidden Schools, or on one of countless battlefields. We also know Elayne “had fought godfires before, in the wars and the long decades since” (Wicked Problems, page 441), but not where.
There are a few references to specific places too. We know the “shipped out to the Shining Empire from a port in Xivai” (LFS, chapter 56), that she “razed the Askoshan Necropolis” (LFS, chapter 29), and first saw gripfire used “in a delaying action in the Schwarzwald, near Grangruft University” (LFS, chapter 60). I’m not quite sure with Xivai or the Askoshan Necropolis are, but from this we know at the very least that she went to the Old World to fight - the Schwarzwald is Craft!Germany, and the Shining Empire is Craft!China.
We also see this quote:
“You were a young woman once, and then you went to war.
Many years have passed since you fought—since you stalked through the rotting jungle, blade wet, since you hid in a muddy defile from searching angels, since you led the doomed and damned and dead through the wasteland game board you had made of someone else’s world.”
This could refer to yet another unknown battlefield, or to the Semioticists’ Rebellion we learn a little about in Last First Snow. Well, we learn about what Elayne did during that rebellion. We don’t know much about the Semioticists.
Early in Last First Snow she tells Caleb that she first met his Caleb when she was “fresh from the Semioticists’ Rebellion in Southern Kath” (LFS, chapter 6). Southern Kath is the analogue to South America, but is not connected to the Northern Kath continent because giant magical serpents. Later in the same book, she tells Temoc what she did there:
“I never told you what I did in the Semioticist’s Rebellion—why they took me off the field and sent me to the King in Red, before I met you.”
He shook his head.
“I burned down a forest to kill one man. It didn’t work. So I followed him across a mountain and a desert into another jungle’s heart. I killed five gods hunting him. Small gods, but still. I should have died myself. I almost did. He hurt my friends. Someone I loved tried to turn me from the hunt, and I didn’t listen.”
Who was this man? What did he do to her friends? And who did Elayne love who tried to turn her from the hunt? I don’t know if we’ll ever know, the way Elayne Kevarian holds her cards so close to her chest. But my god do I want to know.
The razing of the Askoshan Necropolis could potentially be part of this, along with Elayne stalking through a rotting jungle as outlined in the quote above, but it isn’t certain. If anyone can speculate to the linguistic origin of Askoshan (or Xivai, actually), I would greatly appreciate it!
After this, Elayne was sent to the King in Red, for what seemed like an easy mission. Early in Last First Snow we get a brief summary of what happened there:
“They sent me here for an easy assignment: help Kopil broker peace with your gods. It wasn’t so easy as we thought. Talks broke down. Peace failed.” And snow fell on Dresediel Lex for the first and last time. Lightning crackled in the sky above, eternally, a tree of thorns on which Craftsmen impaled the gods they caught and killed. Engines of war rent the skies asunder. The King in Red blazed with hellfire in the heavens. She’d found Temoc in Sansilva snow, speared through the stomach with a thorn of ice. She had healed him. She wasn’t sure even the King in Red knew that.”
In classic Gladstone style, he revisits this moment later in the book with more context and more grit, ramming the idea home harder. It works particularly well in this book; the first descriptive fits tonally with the relative peace and safety of the Skittersill peace talks, while the latter resonates with the bloody outcome of the Rising.
“-was the snow that fell on Dresediel Lex for the first and last time, and let smoking holes in stone. Gods died in the sky, pierced by thorns of light, as Craftsmen clad in war engines marched through the city’s wreckage. Stench of motor oil and blood, saltpeter and ozone, brick dust and sand. Life’s million colours faded black and white from soul-loss as she staggered from her war machine down an alley, fatigues bloodsoaked, her eyes shining and her body wet, toward where Temoc lay impaled-”
Like much of the God Wars, we don’t know what actually caused the Dresediel Lex talks to break down. I can’t imagine the combatants were particularly prone to compromise. The Quechal gods were bloodthirsty, and the King in Red had a very personal vendetta against the pantheon and their priesthood. The temporary peace was unlikely to last while they all lived.
Peace failed, and the battle raged again. When flying through the air of Dresediel Lex towards 667 Sansilva - Kopil’s head office, and formerly the most sacred pyramid to the gods - Elayne remembers her time there before:
“Approaching from the air, she’d been overcome by memory: the greatest battle of Liberation was fought here, forty years ago. Here, Kopil broke gods on their altars. Forty years gone and still, to her eyes, rivers of rainbow blood rolled down the pyramid’s steps, and ichor slicked its surfaces.”
One can only extrapolate from these quotes the overwhelming destruction, pain, and fear of Liberation.
Although Elayne remembers the brutality of the battle in negative terms - wreckage, soul-loss, the stench of blood - at the time she was a key player. Kopil remembers her as “the young woman he had known, who flew in the vanguard of his army and smote their enemies to rubble” (LFS, epilogue) and Denovo recalls that when they started out Elayne was “more bloodthirsty than I’ve ever been” (Three Parts Dead, page 173). Elayne of the present day speaks of “that damn war” (3PD, page 255) and describes the horrors she both committed and faced down rather than the glories: “What we did, what was done to us, was not war. The sky opened and the earth rose. Water burned and fire flowed. The dead became weapons. The weapons came alive” (3PD, page 105).
But the Elayne of Liberation was a warrior. We don’t know her war name (in The City’s Thirst, we find out that Craftsfolk gave themselves grand war names in battle, like the King in Red) but I imagine it was something vicious. Even so, she saved Temoc - her enemy. The God Wars didn’t end here, so we can presume Elayne’s wars didn’t either. Yet, I feel that saving Temoc Almotil started the end of Elayne’s bloodthirst. By seeing her enemy as human, as a teenager like her, a teenager dedicated to a cause, willing to die for what he thinks is right even if it isn’t what she thinks is right, she started the process of taking herself back from the brink. Unlike Kopil, by the time we get to the main series Elayne is past her wars. They shaped her, of course, but as she says to the gods of Chakal Square, “Those Wars were long done, at least for her. For some, they would never end” (LFS, chapter 57). Her post-war experience with Alexander Denovo and creating Justice from the corpse of Seril was a key moment, but not the first.
Elayne, unlike many of her war comrades, dedicates her life to trying to build a genuinely better world. She says to Kopil that “We were supposed to be better than this. Our rule was supposed to make people free, and safe” (LFS, epilogue), and tells Dawn that when she was hurt, she “tried to build a world that was a little safer for strange girls on beaches. And it is better now. A little. You, not knowing how it was before, will have trust me on that” (Wicked Problems, page 304).
Elayne Kevarian came out the other side of the God Wars, though she became a different person. Kopil and Temoc are still fighting their old wars. Elayne moved through and past them.
“Whatever happened,” he said, “to the woman who razed the Askoshan Necropolis? I miss her.”
Elayne let one corner of her mouth creep upward. “She wouldn’t have survived as long as I have. She didn’t, in fact.”
What do you think? Do you want to see more of Elayne’s past, or are you happy with the glimpses we get here? Let me know - and don’t forget you can subscribe to be the first to hear about new articles and fun projects in the pipeline. Like what we do here? Tips welcome on ko-fi to help pay for the site!
