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vibishan
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shipoftheseus
Other Characters: none
Character Name: General Shuos Jedao neé Garach Jedao Shkan, the Arch-traitor, the Immolation Fox
Series: Machineries of Empire trilogy
Age: Jedao was executed at 45, and then his mind was preserved in a sufficiently-advanced-technology called the “black cradle” for 400 years, during which time he was periodically “anchored” in a living person to serve as a tactician for the Hexarchate. He is conscious inside the black cradle, which he describes as cold and black.
From When?: After the detonation of the carrion bomb at the end of Ninefox Gambit.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Jedao is a mass-murderer several times over, willing to sacrifice his own troops, slaughter civilians, and deploy truly horrific futuristic weapons of mass destruction, but it’s difficult to hold this against him. He’s one of very few people who truly sees and wishes to change the atrocities his society is founded on, and all of the terrible things he does on the grand scale are intended to work toward the greater good of overthrowing the Hept/Hexarchate. He knows the price he’s paying, and hates himself for the compromises he makes, to the point of being deeply suicidal.
What he really needs to change isn’t his willingness to do terrible things to fight the Hexarchate - there is no possible world in which the Hexarchate is peacefully defeated, and he’s working with the only tools he has in a terrible situation - but his overwhelming, crushing secretiveness, his constant lying and manipulating and sometimes brutal cruelty on a much smaller, personal scale, even with his putative allies. He terrorizes Cheris to the breaking point just to teach her a lesson - one he wants her to learn because he likes her and genuinely wants to help her. He realizes quickly that he’s been awful and apologizes, but this kind of behavior is second nature to him. He has to learn to take chances on people, to be more open, to engage sincerely with anyone in a way that goes against his entire lifetime of training and a long twilight undeath of horrible isolated maneuvering.
Item:
Arrival: Jedao was brought against his will at the moment of his (second) death.
Abilities/Powers: Jedao is, for the most part, a standard human. He’s a genius tactician who (depending on how you interpret the events of Ninefox Gambit), never lost a battle in a very long and storied career. He’s thoroughly trained as a spy, saboteur, hacker and assassin, and he can be assumed to be in peak human health and longevity as created by hyper-advanced space opera biotech in a society where people routinely live to 140-150, and has reflexes in the 96th percentile of said Shuos assassin recruits.
Beyond that, only two things really qualify as a ‘power,’ and one of them debatable: his demonstrated ability to read body language preternaturally well. He often responds to things Cheris is thinking only by observing her posture and expressions. Cheris is canonically expressive, but the specificity of his interpretation is still remarkable. The second is his ability to see a 360º range of vision around and behind him. This is a consequence of his transformation into the black cradle’s ghost for 397 years. This is minor enough, I think, that I'd prefer him to keep it on the barge - also because he wouldn't think to ask for it back, and its presence will be a constant reminder of things he might otherwise try to avoid.
Also, people from his world sometimes manifest their signifiers. For Jedao, this means his shadow sometimes has the appearance of a nine-tailed fox with yellow eyes (how can a shadow be yellow? Idfk, it just does somehow) at the tip of each tail. This doesn’t give him any actual advantage beyond theatrics (and he can't actually control it), but it’s canon and it’s cool.
On the negative side, he has dyscalculia.
Personality:
“You can learn how people think by playing with their lives, but that’s inhumane. So I used ordinary games instead. Gambling. Board games. Dueling.”
Jedao is always, always aware of the human element in any situation. The Fortress of Scattered Needles has “Shields of Invariant Ice” which are supposed to be impossible to get through. But Jedao’s angle is immediately unconcerned with the technical specifications of the shields. “We aren’t fighting the shields. We’re fighting the shield’s operator.” In the battle of Candle Arc, his entire strategy revolves around knowing his opposing general’s psychology from observing her previous battles. He tricks her into the kind of stubborn, aggressive approach she is prone to while setting up a situation that lets him hammer her forces in a bottleneck, as long as she keeps pushing forward. At one point, Cheris calls up the records of the casualties of the Hellspin Fortress, the site of Jedao’s most notorious massacre, and he challenges her to give him any name from the rebellion, out of millions. From the tiny capsules in the records, he remembers or deduces their home cities, their spiritual traditions, their relations with their peers and Lanterner command, what they were hoping for as they lay dying. He thinks about people, he understands people, and he mourns people, even his enemies. And he uses that knowledge to his advantage.
This makes him sound cold, but Shuos Jedao is a secret sentimentalist, with an odd nurturing streak. He always wanted children, but knew it would be too risky to have such vulnerable attachments. He wanted to be an instructor, but his application was denied because Kel Command preferred to keep his talents in the field. He likes to teach - he wants people to learn better, to think, to succeed. He tends to go about this in circuitous and sometimes shockingly callous ways, both because of 1) how he himself was trained, and 2) because of the secrecy that his treacherous ambitious demand of him. The things he says straight out - and there are many - are never actually precisely what he wants Cheris to learn; he tries to get her to realize things on her own, because that’s what real learning is - or more cynically, almost tautologically because she won’t understand why he’s made the choices he has until she understands, until she’s on his side.
He’s cagey, which is not quite the same as secretive. He gives her a lot of accurate information for the asking, and sometimes volunteers things - although usually in a sideways way, like when he suggests that she put together propaganda leaflets on the history of the Liozh rebellion for the enemy, when really he wanted her to have a reason to learn the history. When he provides information, it’s to serve another purpose: either to give her a certain impression about himself (although what impression he wants can change day to day or minute to minute) or because he wants her to use the information to reach another conclusion. With Cheris, that conclusion is generally a true one (if perhaps biased), but he can do the same thing exactly as effectively with lies, such as when he convinces Vahenz that he could be suborned to delay her from killing him until he can kill her. He’s charming when he wants to be, and very rarely closed-off - he presents himself to Cheris and Vahenz both as a creature of emotions. This is part of his spy training as well as just his personality: if you aren’t showing anything, people know you’re hiding something. Instead of giving no signals, he gives many, and some of them are sincere and some are not. He’s very good at plausible lies, from the heartbreaking and completely fictitious psychological confession he gives Vahenz to the fake political goals he tries to give Kujen, to the time he lets Khiaz ‘extract’ a banal fear of death from him - when actually he is deeply suicidal. This lie comes to fruition four years later, when she consigns him to the black cradle’s terrible immortality, exactly as he hoped.
Jedao is also, for all his many, many sins, a deeply moral and unusually clear-eyed person. He was brought up in an autocratic society fundamentally built on 1) enforcing complete Doctrinal consensus via constant inquisitions, executions, and re-education 2) ritual public torture of dissenters to anchor a “High Calendar” that enables exotic effects (essentially magic) that the Heptarchate technologically depends on. Jedao is recruited and trained by the Shuos, a faction of spies, analysts, and assassins. Everyone around him - even good people, brave and honorable and kind people - thinks of the remembrances (see: ritual public torture) as, at worst, an unpleasant necessity, not something to dwell on. Death is commonplace and heresy is intolerable. Jedao doesn’t just hate the remembrances, either, doesn’t merely plot and plan in secret while serving the Heptarchate with all his skills. Twice we actually see him in action during his own life, and both times he tries to mitigate the damage. In the Battle of Candle Arc, when his enemies realize they’re beaten, they mutiny and try to trade their commander in order to escape. The Doctrine Officer on Jedao’s ship points out that if they acquire her and torture her properly before the day is over, they can cement calendrical control over the area. Jedao - despite the possibility of arousing suspicion - invents pretexts to refuse the deal, preferring to give the enemy commander a cleaner deaths in battle. During the Lanterner rebellion, when the defensive outposts are stuffed with children and the sick as shields for the skeleton crews, he tries desperately to contact a general he can pressure or manipulate into giving him orders to back off, trying to suggest it will be a propaganda problem. The only one who answers his call, however, straightforwardly reassures him that he can just blast through. Jedao actually dissociates as a result, and loses over two days of time. But once he can’t get out of it, he obeys orders - not because he cares particularly about obedience, but if he doesn’t, he’ll be removed, and his second in command will obey, and he’ll have lost his chance to change anything.
Despite his goals, despite the moral clarity of his awareness even under the ubiquitous pressure of his culture, Jedao is also a brutal, ruthless killer. Over and over again, he proves his willingness to sacrifice his own troops for a ploy, to use terrible weapons, to accept any cost to win. Sometimes being a tactical genius does mean seeing a way to defeat the enemy with none of your own losses, even in a terrible situation, such as at the battle of Candle Arc. But sometimes it means seeing solutions anyone else would dismiss as repulsive, such as when he sacrifices a battalion of troops to get the enemy to celebrate on a day that should be one of mourning, wrecking their calendar and depowering their exotic weapons. In the short story “Gamer’s End,” Jedao runs a simulation to train a young cadet for the front. Part of the simulation involves pretending the ‘actual’ simulation has been shut down by an invasion of the station, which he convinces the cadet is a real maneuver by using volunteer ‘enemy’ actors with live grenades, several of whom the cadet kills. In the end, the cadet refuses to crash the station (having been guided to a dummy control room) into the planet below, even to stop the enemy from taking over the center of Shuos power. Jedao says the student has passed, and will go to the front to fight the Taurags. (The Taurags themselves have a strong sense of honor, and the Shuos, as the long-term strategists in the Hexarchate, are concerned with what the diplomatic position will look like after the war. This isn’t altruism on their part.) The student points out that Jedao himself would have failed that test, and he doesn’t disagree. When he relates the murder of his command staff at Hellspin fortress, he mentions that one of his aides could have shot him through another officer. “She wouldn’t have thought of that, but I did, right away.” This is how his mind works. It’s even how his body works: when Kujen shows up without warning in his office, Jedao shoots him automatically, cursing his reflexes for blowing the chance to play innocent both before and after Kujen returns in a new body.
Jedao’s keen sense of humanity, his ability to research, understand, and think like his enemy, his quiet but irrepressible morality, and his unmatched skill at deception and murder do not combine into a particularly stable or happy person. He spends most of his life suicidal even while he’s angling for immortality. Over and over, he’s tempted to kill himself - and over and over he pushes past the temptation. After the siege of Hellspin Fortress, this is particularly clear. After all his machinations, he has a single bullet left for himself. But in the end, he knows that the only thing worse than all the killing he’s done would be to have done them in vain, to no purpose. So he lets the extraction team take him quietly. Whenever possible, Jedao will blame himself. Sereset actively encourages Jedao to kill him quickly - even with the arrival of medical, he would be crippled for life, and he doesn’t want to betray Jedao under the influence. Sereset clearly doesn’t blame Jedao for a treasonous conversation that Sereset himself started - but once the deed is done, Jedao begs Sereset “Never forgive me.” His self-blame is constant and self-reinforcing. He resolves never to confide in anyone or have close attachments again, cutting himself off from even the possibility of understanding, allies, or support. Jedao never, that we see, gets obviously angry - he gets cold, he cuts people off, he sometimes reveals desperation or old pain, he even dissociates, but he never yells or breaks things, never loses his temper in the way that Kujen’s arrival makes him lose control of his paranoia. His major operating emotions are curiosity, empathy, regret, professional paranoia, and self-loathing; everything that ought to make him angry gets folded and repressed into one of those, and usually the last. The sins of the Hexarchate are ultimately his sins, for carrying out their will, for failing (he thinks) to undermine them.
Barge Reactions: To start with, Jedao will be furious that he isn’t properly dead, which he’s wanted desperately for centuries. He will lie about this and pretend to be very grateful for the opportunity. He will assume the floods and breaches are exotic effects dependent on the Admiral’s own particular calendar - which, honestly, is probably as good a way of describing them as any.
He’ll consider the entire structure of graduation to be a game - games, after all, are about behavior modification. You permit some actions, you reward others. You tell the players what their goals are when you convince them to play. Jedao will actually be interested in playing, to an extent; he doesn’t like himself, and his moral conviction is strong enough that he’ll want to take advantage of the barge’s situation and see through what he began with Cheris, or at least find out what happened to her, whether she managed to carry on his fight. And when he finds out that some inmates are given the choice to come, he will be perversely grateful that he didn’t have to make the choice to survive and suffer and continue the fight yet again. He would have accepted the offer if the admiral gave it to him, but there’s a mercy in not having to accept, in having the space to resent it, in being forced to do the right thing he would have done anyway rather than needing to find the fortitude in himself.
He’ll find the barge, with its absolute autocrat, its factions and prescribed roles and terrible disruptions and conveniences to be quite familiar. The strangest thing for Jedao will be the completely different paradigm of most of the barge’s residents, the value placed on freedom and the lack of obvious remembrances (although Jedao will certainly have theories about the various miseries the barge inflicts). Despite his resistance to the Hept/Hexarchate’s atrocities, Jedao has seen democratic governments commit equal crimes; he’s not especially opposed to Doctrine or dictatorships, just the way the one he knows is instantiated by torture. However, during his life he worked as a Shuos agent outside of the Heptarchate’s borders in a variety of different civilizations and inside its borders in heretical cities and planets of various configurations. He’s good at infiltration, at fitting in and making friends, even when he barely knows the local language. Everything that is most upsetting or alien to him is what he’ll smile at most, and then roll with it.
Path to Redemption: What Jedao really needs is an equal - something virtually non-existent in the heavy command hierarchy of Shuos and Kel militaries. Someone who can play games with him - and everything that implies for a Shuos - but who will respect his agency. Someone who will neither exploit and coerce him, like Khiaz and Kujen did, nor be subject to his authority like his Kel underlings, someone he can therefore confide in and impose on. He needs someone who can take his military history and his disastrous slender hope of undermining the Hexarchate more or less at face value, and someone who can’t be put off or swayed by very compelling lies. Someone who’ll read his file without too much touchy-feely caution would be good; that information will be important to have, and the fact that he simply won’t be capable of willingingly giving up that information in a straightforward way is a big part of what he needs to change. He needs someone who will push him and push him until he actually says ‘no’ instead of wriggling away, and then respects his no, who can model honesty and who will encourage him to cultivate all the sentimental attachments he’s always wanted, but never let himself have.
He needs someone who appreciates that there are no-win situations. “You always have a choice,” he tells Kel Menowen. “It’s just that sometimes all of your choices are bad.” He needs a warden who will understand that he tried his best, and was damaged by it, and not treat him like a warmonger or a zealot despite the brutality of his record. Ultimately, a warden will need to engage him with sympathy but without coddling, and model better ways of interacting with others.
Deal:
History: Garach Jedao Shkan was born and raised on an ‘agricultural research facility’ that he jokingly refers to as ‘the farm.’ His mother was single, a scientist, and had three children by different fathers. Jedao’s father was a musician with whom he was passingly acquainted. His childhood was rural-ish, comfortable, loving, and featured multiple geese.
As an ambitious young man, he was recruited by and successfully tested into the Shuos - one of seven factions which controlled Jedao’s society. The Shuos are the faction of spies, analysts, assassins, and saboteurs, a military faction focused on surveillance, manipulation, and long-term strategy. While at Shuos academy, Jedao initially intended to apply for the analyst track. However, near the end of his first year in academy he anonymously submitted a game to the school’s annual design competition (the Shuos having a general preoccupation with games), which awarded points for tricking others into committing minor acts of heresy, in a total autocracy ruled by and dependent on rigidly enforced consensus Doctrine. His best friend and sometime boyfriend, Ruo, ended up committing suicide after trying to play the game on a visiting Doctrine Officer, an offense for which he might easily have been slowly and publically tortured. Another student took credit for the game - and was essentially commended for her “boldness and ruthlessness”. Jedao never told a soul it was really his.
Ruo had planned to take the assassin track, and Jedao took that specialty, in a twisted way, in his honor. He wanted, even then, to bring the Heptarchate down. He didn’t have a real plan, and knew he couldn’t achieve it with a handful of assassinations, but it was a place to start. He thrived - miserable, full of self-loathing, but brilliant and skilled.
When he was twenty-five, on an unnamed planet fighting an unnamed rebellion, Jedao ended up in a heretical conversation with his fellow infantry agent, Shuos Sereset, who lay dying slowly from friendly fire as they awaited an extraction neither of them expended to find them in time. Jedao said, without explicitly saying he’d been trying to figure it out, that the only way to overthrow the Heptarchate would be for all, or at least many, of the scattered rebellions and heresies to unify. Sereset pointed out that such a feat would take “more than a lifetime” to arrange. Jedao is aware at the time that the military Kel faction have access to a mysterious technology called the black cradle, which somehow induces immortality. He immediately suggests you’d need to pull a “long con,” to get them to want keep you around. Sereset calls him crazy, but when their pickup finally makes contact, they both know immediately that Sereset could betray Jedao, if not out of malice then carelessness while drugged for medical care. Sereset tells Jedao to do it, to kill him and try to take down the empire, even if it is a crazy impossible plan. Jedao smothers him to death before their transport arrives.
He works his way up through the ranks, eventually working directly out of the office of the Shuos Heptarch, Shuos Khiaz, by whom he was sexually coerced and abused. He managed to transfer out of the Shuos altogether and got himself seconded to the Kel, the straightforward military arm of the Heptarchate. He climbed the ranks there too, first as a low-level officer and occasional covert agent, all the way up to general. In thirteen years of service, he never once loses a battle, despite Kel Command considering him more expendable than a ‘real’ Kel officer, and repeatedly throwing him at the worst situations, forcing him to get better and better.
Under the guise of tactical intelligence. Jedao carefully studies every rebellion and heresy he’s sent to combat, searching for potential allies. Unfortunately, in a world where calendrical warfare grants huge and unpredictable, essentially magic advantages, and the easiest and best-known way to anchor a heretical calendar is to hold remembrances of your own, almost all the enemies Jedao encounters are just as willing to commit atrocities to support their regimes as the Heptarchate is. After ten years, however, the Heptarch Nirai Kujen, the immortal mathematical genius who invented the High Calendar (and mothdrives) that enabled the Heptarchate’s formation and interstellar conquest, figures Jedao out. He offers to be Jedao’s mathematician - since it’s ultimately impossible to counter calendrical warfare without one, and Jedao himself is terrible at math - so that he can maintain control over the “parameters” that matter to him, in whatever new regime follows. Jedao neither likes nor trusts him, but has no real choice but to agree, essentially putting him under Kujen’s thumb.
Three years after that, at the end of the Lanterner rebellion, after being ordered to shoot through civilians and children being used as human shields by the Lanterners, nervous about a possible betrayal from Kujen, and more nervous about the growing trend of command by composite hiveminds of officers, which might betray his treacherous intentions if he were ever obligated to wire together, Jedao suffers some kind of mental break. He takes his entire force into the “gyre” around the fortress, defended by “predatory masses and corrosive dust.” He also employs an exotic weapon of mass destruction called a threshold winnower, which basically causes every doorway or orifice to shine ‘corpselight’, a contorting radiation which in turn turns organic matter into splayed lovecraftian nightmares, boring open wounds full teeth and eyes and more corpselight. “From every mouth a maw, from every door a death.” Over a million people died on both sides, and survivors numbered in the hundreds, including Jedao himself.
We know that he misses time, and that after shootng his staff on the command ship so they couldn’t interfere - some of whom served with him for years, the closest thing he had to friends - he didn’t recognize or remember all of them. But it’s also not the psychotic madness the Hexarchate assumes. He deliberately wanted to be inscrutable and terrible, to inspire fear as much as respect, so that Kel Command would choose to preserve him, as any other great and terrible weapon, and he succeeds. He was extracted from the wreckage and eventually executed, with his mind transferred to the black cradle, which held him as a ghost for Kel Command’s perpetual use, whenever they need a dangerous but leashed genius to throw at another impossible battle. In the 400 years that followed, he never lost a battle as a shade, either.
Twenty years after his death - before they pulled Jedao out of the cradle for the first time - one of the seven factions of the Heptarchate embraced democracy. The Liozh were the philosophers and ethicists of the Heptarchate, but they were rapidly declared heretical and destroyed. The Hexarchate underwent rapid reorganization, ultimately becoming the Hexarchate, with a new High Calendar built around six instead of seven.
The book begins with a revival of the Liozh rebellion, centered at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Kel Cheris, a promising infantry colonel and mathematical genius, is chosen as Jedao’s anchor, and manipulated into volunteering. Hexarch Shuos Mikodez suggests Cheris, liking her emotional stability for dealing with a persuasive “mad” traitor’s ghost, and her mathematical ability which makes up for his deficiences. Kujen - who is aware of Jedao’s more deliberate treachery, resists but ultimately accepts the appointment, which isn’t really in his power anyway, except that they need him to operate the black cradle to limit Jedao’s manifestation. He “possesses” but does not control Cheris’s body, operating only as a voice in her head and a shape in her shadow. (He also shows up in place of her reflection.) Together, they take control of a swarm of ships sent to put down the rebellion without destroying too much of the fortress, which sits at a nexus point for Calendrical influence and is staggeringly valuable.
Over the course of the book, they successfully retake the fortress, and Jedao tries to teach Cheris to overcome some of her assumptions without giving himself away. He does, however, ensure that word is sent back to Kel Command that includes Cheris’s use of improvised Calendrical warfare, made possible by her mathematical intuition. Someone somewhere (maybe Kujen, maybe not) realizes Jedao is in league with someone who could effectively help him wage war against the Hexarchate, and they respond with overwhelming force. Cheris welcomes a “relief” swarm from her own side, only for the newcomers to use an exotic “carrion bomb” against her entire fleet, transforming every living person aboard into multicolored fragments and lattices of carrion glass, except for Cheris herself. Jedao, as an exotic shadow anchored to her, takes the damage instead.
I will be bringing Jedao in from this point.
Sample Journal Entry: Test drive meme!
Sample RP: Some prose threads.
Special Notes: i've missed you ahhhhhhhhh
ETA ADDENDUM: As of the publication of Raven Stratagem, it's confirmed that Jedao can "project a false signifier." His real signifier - the image that sometimes appears in his shadow, is the Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, and in addition to being a cosmetic flare it is also, in some murky bullshit space magic way, tied to his person/identity. By fixating on/generating a false signifier, he can shield himself against the telepathic/mental/scrying invasions of the Rahal, who specialize in mental inquisition/extraction. Jedao was worked over by the best Rahal in the Heptarchate after his treachery, but they were never able to get anything out of him except for the image of the Immolation Fox. I don't think he's 100% telepathy proof across all canons, but I'd say he's much tougher to crack than a standard human.
User DW:
vibishanAIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
E-mail: [pm this journal please], or
Other Characters: none
Character Name: General Shuos Jedao neé Garach Jedao Shkan, the Arch-traitor, the Immolation Fox
Series: Machineries of Empire trilogy
Age: Jedao was executed at 45, and then his mind was preserved in a sufficiently-advanced-technology called the “black cradle” for 400 years, during which time he was periodically “anchored” in a living person to serve as a tactician for the Hexarchate. He is conscious inside the black cradle, which he describes as cold and black.
From When?: After the detonation of the carrion bomb at the end of Ninefox Gambit.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Jedao is a mass-murderer several times over, willing to sacrifice his own troops, slaughter civilians, and deploy truly horrific futuristic weapons of mass destruction, but it’s difficult to hold this against him. He’s one of very few people who truly sees and wishes to change the atrocities his society is founded on, and all of the terrible things he does on the grand scale are intended to work toward the greater good of overthrowing the Hept/Hexarchate. He knows the price he’s paying, and hates himself for the compromises he makes, to the point of being deeply suicidal.
What he really needs to change isn’t his willingness to do terrible things to fight the Hexarchate - there is no possible world in which the Hexarchate is peacefully defeated, and he’s working with the only tools he has in a terrible situation - but his overwhelming, crushing secretiveness, his constant lying and manipulating and sometimes brutal cruelty on a much smaller, personal scale, even with his putative allies. He terrorizes Cheris to the breaking point just to teach her a lesson - one he wants her to learn because he likes her and genuinely wants to help her. He realizes quickly that he’s been awful and apologizes, but this kind of behavior is second nature to him. He has to learn to take chances on people, to be more open, to engage sincerely with anyone in a way that goes against his entire lifetime of training and a long twilight undeath of horrible isolated maneuvering.
Arrival: Jedao was brought against his will at the moment of his (second) death.
Abilities/Powers: Jedao is, for the most part, a standard human. He’s a genius tactician who (depending on how you interpret the events of Ninefox Gambit), never lost a battle in a very long and storied career. He’s thoroughly trained as a spy, saboteur, hacker and assassin, and he can be assumed to be in peak human health and longevity as created by hyper-advanced space opera biotech in a society where people routinely live to 140-150, and has reflexes in the 96th percentile of said Shuos assassin recruits.
Beyond that, only two things really qualify as a ‘power,’ and one of them debatable: his demonstrated ability to read body language preternaturally well. He often responds to things Cheris is thinking only by observing her posture and expressions. Cheris is canonically expressive, but the specificity of his interpretation is still remarkable. The second is his ability to see a 360º range of vision around and behind him. This is a consequence of his transformation into the black cradle’s ghost for 397 years. This is minor enough, I think, that I'd prefer him to keep it on the barge - also because he wouldn't think to ask for it back, and its presence will be a constant reminder of things he might otherwise try to avoid.
Also, people from his world sometimes manifest their signifiers. For Jedao, this means his shadow sometimes has the appearance of a nine-tailed fox with yellow eyes (how can a shadow be yellow? Idfk, it just does somehow) at the tip of each tail. This doesn’t give him any actual advantage beyond theatrics (and he can't actually control it), but it’s canon and it’s cool.
On the negative side, he has dyscalculia.
Personality:
“You can learn how people think by playing with their lives, but that’s inhumane. So I used ordinary games instead. Gambling. Board games. Dueling.”
Jedao is always, always aware of the human element in any situation. The Fortress of Scattered Needles has “Shields of Invariant Ice” which are supposed to be impossible to get through. But Jedao’s angle is immediately unconcerned with the technical specifications of the shields. “We aren’t fighting the shields. We’re fighting the shield’s operator.” In the battle of Candle Arc, his entire strategy revolves around knowing his opposing general’s psychology from observing her previous battles. He tricks her into the kind of stubborn, aggressive approach she is prone to while setting up a situation that lets him hammer her forces in a bottleneck, as long as she keeps pushing forward. At one point, Cheris calls up the records of the casualties of the Hellspin Fortress, the site of Jedao’s most notorious massacre, and he challenges her to give him any name from the rebellion, out of millions. From the tiny capsules in the records, he remembers or deduces their home cities, their spiritual traditions, their relations with their peers and Lanterner command, what they were hoping for as they lay dying. He thinks about people, he understands people, and he mourns people, even his enemies. And he uses that knowledge to his advantage.
This makes him sound cold, but Shuos Jedao is a secret sentimentalist, with an odd nurturing streak. He always wanted children, but knew it would be too risky to have such vulnerable attachments. He wanted to be an instructor, but his application was denied because Kel Command preferred to keep his talents in the field. He likes to teach - he wants people to learn better, to think, to succeed. He tends to go about this in circuitous and sometimes shockingly callous ways, both because of 1) how he himself was trained, and 2) because of the secrecy that his treacherous ambitious demand of him. The things he says straight out - and there are many - are never actually precisely what he wants Cheris to learn; he tries to get her to realize things on her own, because that’s what real learning is - or more cynically, almost tautologically because she won’t understand why he’s made the choices he has until she understands, until she’s on his side.
He’s cagey, which is not quite the same as secretive. He gives her a lot of accurate information for the asking, and sometimes volunteers things - although usually in a sideways way, like when he suggests that she put together propaganda leaflets on the history of the Liozh rebellion for the enemy, when really he wanted her to have a reason to learn the history. When he provides information, it’s to serve another purpose: either to give her a certain impression about himself (although what impression he wants can change day to day or minute to minute) or because he wants her to use the information to reach another conclusion. With Cheris, that conclusion is generally a true one (if perhaps biased), but he can do the same thing exactly as effectively with lies, such as when he convinces Vahenz that he could be suborned to delay her from killing him until he can kill her. He’s charming when he wants to be, and very rarely closed-off - he presents himself to Cheris and Vahenz both as a creature of emotions. This is part of his spy training as well as just his personality: if you aren’t showing anything, people know you’re hiding something. Instead of giving no signals, he gives many, and some of them are sincere and some are not. He’s very good at plausible lies, from the heartbreaking and completely fictitious psychological confession he gives Vahenz to the fake political goals he tries to give Kujen, to the time he lets Khiaz ‘extract’ a banal fear of death from him - when actually he is deeply suicidal. This lie comes to fruition four years later, when she consigns him to the black cradle’s terrible immortality, exactly as he hoped.
Jedao is also, for all his many, many sins, a deeply moral and unusually clear-eyed person. He was brought up in an autocratic society fundamentally built on 1) enforcing complete Doctrinal consensus via constant inquisitions, executions, and re-education 2) ritual public torture of dissenters to anchor a “High Calendar” that enables exotic effects (essentially magic) that the Heptarchate technologically depends on. Jedao is recruited and trained by the Shuos, a faction of spies, analysts, and assassins. Everyone around him - even good people, brave and honorable and kind people - thinks of the remembrances (see: ritual public torture) as, at worst, an unpleasant necessity, not something to dwell on. Death is commonplace and heresy is intolerable. Jedao doesn’t just hate the remembrances, either, doesn’t merely plot and plan in secret while serving the Heptarchate with all his skills. Twice we actually see him in action during his own life, and both times he tries to mitigate the damage. In the Battle of Candle Arc, when his enemies realize they’re beaten, they mutiny and try to trade their commander in order to escape. The Doctrine Officer on Jedao’s ship points out that if they acquire her and torture her properly before the day is over, they can cement calendrical control over the area. Jedao - despite the possibility of arousing suspicion - invents pretexts to refuse the deal, preferring to give the enemy commander a cleaner deaths in battle. During the Lanterner rebellion, when the defensive outposts are stuffed with children and the sick as shields for the skeleton crews, he tries desperately to contact a general he can pressure or manipulate into giving him orders to back off, trying to suggest it will be a propaganda problem. The only one who answers his call, however, straightforwardly reassures him that he can just blast through. Jedao actually dissociates as a result, and loses over two days of time. But once he can’t get out of it, he obeys orders - not because he cares particularly about obedience, but if he doesn’t, he’ll be removed, and his second in command will obey, and he’ll have lost his chance to change anything.
Despite his goals, despite the moral clarity of his awareness even under the ubiquitous pressure of his culture, Jedao is also a brutal, ruthless killer. Over and over again, he proves his willingness to sacrifice his own troops for a ploy, to use terrible weapons, to accept any cost to win. Sometimes being a tactical genius does mean seeing a way to defeat the enemy with none of your own losses, even in a terrible situation, such as at the battle of Candle Arc. But sometimes it means seeing solutions anyone else would dismiss as repulsive, such as when he sacrifices a battalion of troops to get the enemy to celebrate on a day that should be one of mourning, wrecking their calendar and depowering their exotic weapons. In the short story “Gamer’s End,” Jedao runs a simulation to train a young cadet for the front. Part of the simulation involves pretending the ‘actual’ simulation has been shut down by an invasion of the station, which he convinces the cadet is a real maneuver by using volunteer ‘enemy’ actors with live grenades, several of whom the cadet kills. In the end, the cadet refuses to crash the station (having been guided to a dummy control room) into the planet below, even to stop the enemy from taking over the center of Shuos power. Jedao says the student has passed, and will go to the front to fight the Taurags. (The Taurags themselves have a strong sense of honor, and the Shuos, as the long-term strategists in the Hexarchate, are concerned with what the diplomatic position will look like after the war. This isn’t altruism on their part.) The student points out that Jedao himself would have failed that test, and he doesn’t disagree. When he relates the murder of his command staff at Hellspin fortress, he mentions that one of his aides could have shot him through another officer. “She wouldn’t have thought of that, but I did, right away.” This is how his mind works. It’s even how his body works: when Kujen shows up without warning in his office, Jedao shoots him automatically, cursing his reflexes for blowing the chance to play innocent both before and after Kujen returns in a new body.
Jedao’s keen sense of humanity, his ability to research, understand, and think like his enemy, his quiet but irrepressible morality, and his unmatched skill at deception and murder do not combine into a particularly stable or happy person. He spends most of his life suicidal even while he’s angling for immortality. Over and over, he’s tempted to kill himself - and over and over he pushes past the temptation. After the siege of Hellspin Fortress, this is particularly clear. After all his machinations, he has a single bullet left for himself. But in the end, he knows that the only thing worse than all the killing he’s done would be to have done them in vain, to no purpose. So he lets the extraction team take him quietly. Whenever possible, Jedao will blame himself. Sereset actively encourages Jedao to kill him quickly - even with the arrival of medical, he would be crippled for life, and he doesn’t want to betray Jedao under the influence. Sereset clearly doesn’t blame Jedao for a treasonous conversation that Sereset himself started - but once the deed is done, Jedao begs Sereset “Never forgive me.” His self-blame is constant and self-reinforcing. He resolves never to confide in anyone or have close attachments again, cutting himself off from even the possibility of understanding, allies, or support. Jedao never, that we see, gets obviously angry - he gets cold, he cuts people off, he sometimes reveals desperation or old pain, he even dissociates, but he never yells or breaks things, never loses his temper in the way that Kujen’s arrival makes him lose control of his paranoia. His major operating emotions are curiosity, empathy, regret, professional paranoia, and self-loathing; everything that ought to make him angry gets folded and repressed into one of those, and usually the last. The sins of the Hexarchate are ultimately his sins, for carrying out their will, for failing (he thinks) to undermine them.
Barge Reactions: To start with, Jedao will be furious that he isn’t properly dead, which he’s wanted desperately for centuries. He will lie about this and pretend to be very grateful for the opportunity. He will assume the floods and breaches are exotic effects dependent on the Admiral’s own particular calendar - which, honestly, is probably as good a way of describing them as any.
He’ll consider the entire structure of graduation to be a game - games, after all, are about behavior modification. You permit some actions, you reward others. You tell the players what their goals are when you convince them to play. Jedao will actually be interested in playing, to an extent; he doesn’t like himself, and his moral conviction is strong enough that he’ll want to take advantage of the barge’s situation and see through what he began with Cheris, or at least find out what happened to her, whether she managed to carry on his fight. And when he finds out that some inmates are given the choice to come, he will be perversely grateful that he didn’t have to make the choice to survive and suffer and continue the fight yet again. He would have accepted the offer if the admiral gave it to him, but there’s a mercy in not having to accept, in having the space to resent it, in being forced to do the right thing he would have done anyway rather than needing to find the fortitude in himself.
He’ll find the barge, with its absolute autocrat, its factions and prescribed roles and terrible disruptions and conveniences to be quite familiar. The strangest thing for Jedao will be the completely different paradigm of most of the barge’s residents, the value placed on freedom and the lack of obvious remembrances (although Jedao will certainly have theories about the various miseries the barge inflicts). Despite his resistance to the Hept/Hexarchate’s atrocities, Jedao has seen democratic governments commit equal crimes; he’s not especially opposed to Doctrine or dictatorships, just the way the one he knows is instantiated by torture. However, during his life he worked as a Shuos agent outside of the Heptarchate’s borders in a variety of different civilizations and inside its borders in heretical cities and planets of various configurations. He’s good at infiltration, at fitting in and making friends, even when he barely knows the local language. Everything that is most upsetting or alien to him is what he’ll smile at most, and then roll with it.
Path to Redemption: What Jedao really needs is an equal - something virtually non-existent in the heavy command hierarchy of Shuos and Kel militaries. Someone who can play games with him - and everything that implies for a Shuos - but who will respect his agency. Someone who will neither exploit and coerce him, like Khiaz and Kujen did, nor be subject to his authority like his Kel underlings, someone he can therefore confide in and impose on. He needs someone who can take his military history and his disastrous slender hope of undermining the Hexarchate more or less at face value, and someone who can’t be put off or swayed by very compelling lies. Someone who’ll read his file without too much touchy-feely caution would be good; that information will be important to have, and the fact that he simply won’t be capable of willingingly giving up that information in a straightforward way is a big part of what he needs to change. He needs someone who will push him and push him until he actually says ‘no’ instead of wriggling away, and then respects his no, who can model honesty and who will encourage him to cultivate all the sentimental attachments he’s always wanted, but never let himself have.
He needs someone who appreciates that there are no-win situations. “You always have a choice,” he tells Kel Menowen. “It’s just that sometimes all of your choices are bad.” He needs a warden who will understand that he tried his best, and was damaged by it, and not treat him like a warmonger or a zealot despite the brutality of his record. Ultimately, a warden will need to engage him with sympathy but without coddling, and model better ways of interacting with others.
History: Garach Jedao Shkan was born and raised on an ‘agricultural research facility’ that he jokingly refers to as ‘the farm.’ His mother was single, a scientist, and had three children by different fathers. Jedao’s father was a musician with whom he was passingly acquainted. His childhood was rural-ish, comfortable, loving, and featured multiple geese.
As an ambitious young man, he was recruited by and successfully tested into the Shuos - one of seven factions which controlled Jedao’s society. The Shuos are the faction of spies, analysts, assassins, and saboteurs, a military faction focused on surveillance, manipulation, and long-term strategy. While at Shuos academy, Jedao initially intended to apply for the analyst track. However, near the end of his first year in academy he anonymously submitted a game to the school’s annual design competition (the Shuos having a general preoccupation with games), which awarded points for tricking others into committing minor acts of heresy, in a total autocracy ruled by and dependent on rigidly enforced consensus Doctrine. His best friend and sometime boyfriend, Ruo, ended up committing suicide after trying to play the game on a visiting Doctrine Officer, an offense for which he might easily have been slowly and publically tortured. Another student took credit for the game - and was essentially commended for her “boldness and ruthlessness”. Jedao never told a soul it was really his.
Ruo had planned to take the assassin track, and Jedao took that specialty, in a twisted way, in his honor. He wanted, even then, to bring the Heptarchate down. He didn’t have a real plan, and knew he couldn’t achieve it with a handful of assassinations, but it was a place to start. He thrived - miserable, full of self-loathing, but brilliant and skilled.
When he was twenty-five, on an unnamed planet fighting an unnamed rebellion, Jedao ended up in a heretical conversation with his fellow infantry agent, Shuos Sereset, who lay dying slowly from friendly fire as they awaited an extraction neither of them expended to find them in time. Jedao said, without explicitly saying he’d been trying to figure it out, that the only way to overthrow the Heptarchate would be for all, or at least many, of the scattered rebellions and heresies to unify. Sereset pointed out that such a feat would take “more than a lifetime” to arrange. Jedao is aware at the time that the military Kel faction have access to a mysterious technology called the black cradle, which somehow induces immortality. He immediately suggests you’d need to pull a “long con,” to get them to want keep you around. Sereset calls him crazy, but when their pickup finally makes contact, they both know immediately that Sereset could betray Jedao, if not out of malice then carelessness while drugged for medical care. Sereset tells Jedao to do it, to kill him and try to take down the empire, even if it is a crazy impossible plan. Jedao smothers him to death before their transport arrives.
He works his way up through the ranks, eventually working directly out of the office of the Shuos Heptarch, Shuos Khiaz, by whom he was sexually coerced and abused. He managed to transfer out of the Shuos altogether and got himself seconded to the Kel, the straightforward military arm of the Heptarchate. He climbed the ranks there too, first as a low-level officer and occasional covert agent, all the way up to general. In thirteen years of service, he never once loses a battle, despite Kel Command considering him more expendable than a ‘real’ Kel officer, and repeatedly throwing him at the worst situations, forcing him to get better and better.
Under the guise of tactical intelligence. Jedao carefully studies every rebellion and heresy he’s sent to combat, searching for potential allies. Unfortunately, in a world where calendrical warfare grants huge and unpredictable, essentially magic advantages, and the easiest and best-known way to anchor a heretical calendar is to hold remembrances of your own, almost all the enemies Jedao encounters are just as willing to commit atrocities to support their regimes as the Heptarchate is. After ten years, however, the Heptarch Nirai Kujen, the immortal mathematical genius who invented the High Calendar (and mothdrives) that enabled the Heptarchate’s formation and interstellar conquest, figures Jedao out. He offers to be Jedao’s mathematician - since it’s ultimately impossible to counter calendrical warfare without one, and Jedao himself is terrible at math - so that he can maintain control over the “parameters” that matter to him, in whatever new regime follows. Jedao neither likes nor trusts him, but has no real choice but to agree, essentially putting him under Kujen’s thumb.
Three years after that, at the end of the Lanterner rebellion, after being ordered to shoot through civilians and children being used as human shields by the Lanterners, nervous about a possible betrayal from Kujen, and more nervous about the growing trend of command by composite hiveminds of officers, which might betray his treacherous intentions if he were ever obligated to wire together, Jedao suffers some kind of mental break. He takes his entire force into the “gyre” around the fortress, defended by “predatory masses and corrosive dust.” He also employs an exotic weapon of mass destruction called a threshold winnower, which basically causes every doorway or orifice to shine ‘corpselight’, a contorting radiation which in turn turns organic matter into splayed lovecraftian nightmares, boring open wounds full teeth and eyes and more corpselight. “From every mouth a maw, from every door a death.” Over a million people died on both sides, and survivors numbered in the hundreds, including Jedao himself.
We know that he misses time, and that after shootng his staff on the command ship so they couldn’t interfere - some of whom served with him for years, the closest thing he had to friends - he didn’t recognize or remember all of them. But it’s also not the psychotic madness the Hexarchate assumes. He deliberately wanted to be inscrutable and terrible, to inspire fear as much as respect, so that Kel Command would choose to preserve him, as any other great and terrible weapon, and he succeeds. He was extracted from the wreckage and eventually executed, with his mind transferred to the black cradle, which held him as a ghost for Kel Command’s perpetual use, whenever they need a dangerous but leashed genius to throw at another impossible battle. In the 400 years that followed, he never lost a battle as a shade, either.
Twenty years after his death - before they pulled Jedao out of the cradle for the first time - one of the seven factions of the Heptarchate embraced democracy. The Liozh were the philosophers and ethicists of the Heptarchate, but they were rapidly declared heretical and destroyed. The Hexarchate underwent rapid reorganization, ultimately becoming the Hexarchate, with a new High Calendar built around six instead of seven.
The book begins with a revival of the Liozh rebellion, centered at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Kel Cheris, a promising infantry colonel and mathematical genius, is chosen as Jedao’s anchor, and manipulated into volunteering. Hexarch Shuos Mikodez suggests Cheris, liking her emotional stability for dealing with a persuasive “mad” traitor’s ghost, and her mathematical ability which makes up for his deficiences. Kujen - who is aware of Jedao’s more deliberate treachery, resists but ultimately accepts the appointment, which isn’t really in his power anyway, except that they need him to operate the black cradle to limit Jedao’s manifestation. He “possesses” but does not control Cheris’s body, operating only as a voice in her head and a shape in her shadow. (He also shows up in place of her reflection.) Together, they take control of a swarm of ships sent to put down the rebellion without destroying too much of the fortress, which sits at a nexus point for Calendrical influence and is staggeringly valuable.
Over the course of the book, they successfully retake the fortress, and Jedao tries to teach Cheris to overcome some of her assumptions without giving himself away. He does, however, ensure that word is sent back to Kel Command that includes Cheris’s use of improvised Calendrical warfare, made possible by her mathematical intuition. Someone somewhere (maybe Kujen, maybe not) realizes Jedao is in league with someone who could effectively help him wage war against the Hexarchate, and they respond with overwhelming force. Cheris welcomes a “relief” swarm from her own side, only for the newcomers to use an exotic “carrion bomb” against her entire fleet, transforming every living person aboard into multicolored fragments and lattices of carrion glass, except for Cheris herself. Jedao, as an exotic shadow anchored to her, takes the damage instead.
I will be bringing Jedao in from this point.
Sample Journal Entry: Test drive meme!
Sample RP: Some prose threads.
Special Notes: i've missed you ahhhhhhhhh
ETA ADDENDUM: As of the publication of Raven Stratagem, it's confirmed that Jedao can "project a false signifier." His real signifier - the image that sometimes appears in his shadow, is the Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, and in addition to being a cosmetic flare it is also, in some murky bullshit space magic way, tied to his person/identity. By fixating on/generating a false signifier, he can shield himself against the telepathic/mental/scrying invasions of the Rahal, who specialize in mental inquisition/extraction. Jedao was worked over by the best Rahal in the Heptarchate after his treachery, but they were never able to get anything out of him except for the image of the Immolation Fox. I don't think he's 100% telepathy proof across all canons, but I'd say he's much tougher to crack than a standard human.
