What do the skazzerai want - and how are they connected to Dawn?
The skazzerai are coming for the Domain. We’ve been talking about them for a while, and the Craft Wars book thus far only confirmed what we suspected: our characters are counting down the days until an enormous demon space spider reaches the world, and they’re running out of time.
But what do they want?
This essay contains spoilers for books up to and including Wicked Problems.
“Hasn’t it ever occurred to you to ask what the skazzerai ARE? How you’d know one if you met it in the flesh. Of course not.”
A quick reminder of what we’ve already covered in the skazzerai / space spiders series:
Before the Craft Wars quartet, I looked at all the references to space spiders and what they might mean.
I explored what Tara had learnt about the skazzerai between Ruin of Angels and Dead Country (tl;dr, mostly myth and rumour)
In Dead Country, Tara, Dawn and Connor end up in an edge storm in the Badlands, where they should be able to see many possible futures – but see only one, where the skazzerai have come to the Domain.
Denovo caught a sort of proto-Craft-god-thing and experimented on her. I theorised that she is a skazzerai, or at least a skazzerai-like phenomenon.
We got a lot more in Wicked Problems, and I looked at what we learned from Grimwald and his ancient memories of the last time the skazzerai came to the Domain.
In the same book, we saw weird metal chain people in human skin, who appeared to be made of skazzerai metal.
And, finally, I looked at billionaire Eberhardt Jax, what he wants, and how he is connected to the skazzerai.
Caught up? Grand.
Looking back through this, and my recent Wicked Problems Story So Far, it seemed to me that we needed one final piece to the skazzerai puzzle. What do they want? And why are they on their way now?
We’ve known since Ruin of Angels that they are “hungry.” But hungry for what?
“Do you know what they are? Why they come?”
“They’re hungry,” Kai said.
“For what, though? Plenty of food up there. Flesh is just a trick of carbon. You can mine ore from dead rocks. But desire—that is rare. Desire of the kind that drives the skazzerai: a hunger that when sated only grows. It is the rarest thing in the universe, that gap between what might be and what is, the potential difference that drives the world. If I have something you want, you will strive for it. You will offer your soul to me in trade. If you stop wanting once I give it to you, well, end of transaction. But if you don’t stop—if you want in infinite perversity, into the strangeness beyond satiety—if you want things that do not exist, that never could—you will feed me forever. You can’t smelt that depth of need in any star-forge.”
The skazzerai feed off desire, off unsatiable greed. As does, in many ways, the Craft.
We’ve heard a lot of Craftsfolk and Craft-y creations hungering. Hungering for power, for souls, for more. But, as Grimwald outlined above, that hunger isn’t really sated. Maestre Gerhardt, the progenitor of the Craft, refused to die and kept destroying the world around him bit by bit for a century. The technological advances made possible by the Craft eat up soil and water and life itself. Rather than paying taxes, people sacrifice. Rather than paying with a currency, they pay with pieces of their very soul.
The system that underpins the world is interminably hungry, and encourages people to desire ever more.
(If you haven’t realised before, the Craft is a representation of capitalism.)
Every Craftsperson longs to work their way up the hierarchy to gain more power. They mortgage their souls to do it. And everyday ordinary people desire more, and better, and are encouraged to do so. The people at the top of the ladder are no better – look at Eberhardt Jax, the billionaire, hungering to have and to be more. Look at Alexander Denovo, whose life (and unlife) goal was to become for all intents and purposes a god. Look at the gods, weaving themselves together with other pantheons and with the Craft through complex economic agreements to get ever larger returns on investment.
I said in a previous essay that:
“The skazzerai are the Craft-god. The Craft-god is the skazzerai. Or, at least, they’re the same type of phenomenon. The Dawn-Craft-god meld isn’t a space spider hungering at the end of the universe, but how she was made is the same way they were.
The skazzerai are the Craft come to ‘life’, emergent network phenomena at the end of the universe, making bargains with their potential victims, hungering after souls and the Craft. And that sounds exactly like the Craft-god: she emerged from the Craft usage in the Domain, made a bargain with Dawn for escape and control (surrender all, gain all), and is hungering for more.”
Not going to lie, I hadn’t reread this piece in a couple of years and am quite impressed with how right I was.
Because this is what Grimwald tells Kai next:
“People who want that way, they flood their worlds with ruined oceans, they choke on their own waste. But rarely, they wake up.
“Not one of them or two. The whole world at once, suddenly alive. I’m not talking about planets either—planets are a distraction, birds, beasts, bodies, details—but worlds: worlds of people, culture, meaning, awake and self-aware and wanting. Desire is their heart, fear is their blood. And in some ancient age, on some distant world, they were given a name.”
Kai gazed into that maw. “Skazzerai.”
The Craft-god, who melded with Dawn and became the Dawn-and-Sybil unit is the Domain itself, awakened. Dawn is a skazzerai.
Yet, she doesn’t appear to know this herself.
She views herself as a Craftswoman becoming a goddess, if she thinks about it at all. But that doesn’t quite make sense when you think of how the Craft and Applied Theology actually work. She doesn’t have enough believers to have this level of power as a goddess; with only the Arsenals, Mal, and Temoc, a goddess wouldn’t even be conscious (see Seril before Three Parts Dead, or Temoc’s remaining Quechal gods, asleep). And although Dawn clearly does use some Craft principles, she again has access to a level of power she shouldn’t at her stage. The most powerful Craftspeople we are aware of have “gone full skeleton” because the human body cannot contain that amount of power. And we see from the King in Red, that he has access to such incredible power because he is tied into the entire city of Dresediel Lex. When DL goes down, with Mal’s Serpent attack in Two Serpents Rise, Kopil is knocked out. Without contracts and ties at that kind of level, a Craftsperson can gain power by sucking life out of everything around her – but Dawn doesn’t do that either. Or, at least, not always.
She does, however, have an impact on the metaphysical Craft world around her:
“Who is this girl you fight for, Temoc? I have read your tablets and your prophecies. She is not mentioned. She has walked the world like a brand through a dry field, trailing fire. Ajaiatez has lost its lady. The Shining Empire writhes in civil war. One of your own dead gods does her bidding. And here you are, man. In the sacred heart of the world, raising powers even I am too wise to screw with. If the stars are wrong, what do you think she is?”
I confess I wasn’t a Dawn fan in Dead Country, but I’ve got a soft spot for her after getting so much of her POV in Wicked Problems. Dawn truly believes she’s doing the right thing, and gearing up to fight the skazzerai that are coming for the Domain. She genuinely thinks that her path is the only way to save the world and all its people from the skazzerai.
She doesn’t realise she is one.
Because this is how all skazzerai are born.
“When the young ones wake, they learn to play the passions of the beings from which they’re born, to stoke rage and strangle need like a body feeds and starves its organs. They don’t kill. They don’t like death, because death is an ending. They demand immortality. Imagine a cruel mind of infinite subtlety, learning you in your most intimate detail. Imagine yourself played like an instrument, screaming, yearning, aching, trembling for all time, because it is your want that feeds them and makes them strong. And when they learn, they rise into the black.”
Dawn isn’t, in my opinion, the “cruel mind of infinite subtlety” but rather herself being “played like an instrument,” because her want feeds the skazzerai power. Dawn’s conscious self wants to save the world, and whatever hunger powers the skazzerai is playing on that desire. She is this skazzerai’s first unknowing victim. She’s building up her inner-skazzerai’s power and thinks she’s building up her own power to fight the skazzerai.
Grimwald tells us why that isn’t going to work for her.
“When they learn, they rise into the black. Where they are eaten.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They are their own best food. They grow until they meet another of their kind, and then they fight. Out in the deep they make war that blights space and withers suns, tearing at one another’s guts to claim immortal dreamers and the hells they dream. The oldest are light-years long, millions of worlds chained by their own fantasies, fonts of soul and terror and desperate wanting. But the young are ripe, and the young are weak. So it is on the young that they feed.”
...
“I feel her moving. So can they, out there in the deepest sky. Like a tremor on a web. The young ones’ waking is the old ones’ dinner bell. It’s sad, really. I hoped it might be different this time.”
So, we already have one skazzerai in play, but she’s going to be food for the Big Threat beyond the sky. Older skazzerai are on their way, and they will eat Dawn (who is trying to connect herself into the entire world, remember) first.
And then…
Well, we don’t know what then.
Our characters seem pretty convinced that Dawn will be nigh unstoppable soon, and the book ends with her essentially devouring both Ajaia (a major goddess) and the skazzerai shard that formed the spirecliffs. Grimwald tells us that the Hero Twins managed to do something last time that didn’t kill the skazzerai but made it run away to nurse its wounds. He says that skazzerai can’t afford a war of attrition.
So we need our characters to figure out a way to get another good punch in, this time before the skazzerai destroy most of the world and kill the vast majority of sentient beings and cultures.
I believe they will. Gladstone isn’t, as far as I can tell, writing a book that’s going to have a miserable ending. But he’s also writing about very real people and all their flaws, so getting everyone together to find a real solution isn’t going to be easy. And remember, the most powerful people in our story have built their power through the very desire and greed that feeds the skazzerai.
What can they do??
Well. You’re going to have to read Dead Hand Rule for that. Which comes out on 28 October 2025, so you should pre-order it now if you haven’t already. It goes Maximum Gladstone, which is to say it’s a wild ride.
Then we can reconvene in 2026 to figure out what’s next.
What do you think? 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!
