Ripheus23

A Labyrinth of Crystallized Light

The scientist did not remember the Low Yield Exchange (also known as the Low Yield Exchange Incident) because she had not been born yet, then. Later, as an adult, she'd come to think about how the philosophy of chaos told her that she would not have been born at all, but for the meeting of the exact same parents as she had, at the exact same time, anyway. Evolution had been kidnapped by extinction, was being dragged towards the monster's layer; this scientist owed the darkness her very life nevertheless.

... [As it turned out, the use of the "mutually-assured-destruction doctrine" to hold back the end of days worked due to the absolute-proof theorem. However, the spider between the lines spun a web of lies that inspired the nuclear militaries of the Earth to develop an enormous number of "low-yield explosives," meaning in the 0.1KT to 10KT equivalence range. Yet so many were manufactured and used that the death toll during the LYEI still amounted to an unprecedented statistic of democide. Here are hypothetical examples of the unconventionally large number of fatalities (from single/limited-number bombing runs in an urban area) during the LYEI:

Seattle: 29,000

Omaha: 35,000

Washington, D.C.: 112,000

Tel Aviv: 123,000* [ironically, Jerusalem is not bombed because it is not recognized by Iran as the capital of Israel]

Tehran: 442,000

Beijing: 1,094,000

Tokyo [don't ask me why/how]: 3,000,000 [assumed]

Delhi: 75,000

Islamabad: 157,000

London: 76,000

Paris: 43,000

Norfolk: 44,000

Pyongyang: 655,000

TOTAL: 5,885,000

The LeMay limit: "theoretical" psychological limit on ordnance expenditure by a given world superpower, over a certain interval. The number is assumed to be around 2 to 3 million (depending on the government in question) and is named in "honor" of Curtis LeMay, the butcher of Japan and Korea. The idea is that the US, for instance, will not use much more energy during a LYE as was used by all factions together during the Second World War. Nevertheless, this "allowed" the US to fire off nearly 3,000,000 tons' worth of low-yield explosives, during the LYEI. (Indeed, it was later discovered that during Operation "Watchmen" a number of political elites had agreed to "grant permission" to each other to use certain quantities of low-yield devices, to kill select numbers of foreign civilians, in order to "demonstrate" the threat of nuclear holocaust sufficiently intensely so that the next generation of political elites would guard against the full-scale form of this threat, i.e. by reaffirming the doctrine of MAD. Unfortunately, the propensity of such a demonstration, to achieve its purpose, was tempered by the widespread apathy expressed about the number of civilians killed during the LYEI, i.e. since it was "too low" ("lower than World War 2," one commentator notes), especially in relation to the global population (7ish billion), it didn't instill enough new dread in enough people, to hold back the future danger of the LYL theory [low-yield lattice theory]...)

http://dc.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2018/02/09/exactly-low-yield-nuclear-weapon/#sthash.I1biKEhs.dpbs

So, it occurred to me, a while after hearing the president of the US (where I live) propose his idea of developing low-yield nuclear weapons systems or whatever, that my special knowledge of the Vietnam War and high-yield nuclear weapons test reports indicates what this proposal would amount to. So, according to Nick Turse's book about the Vietnam War, in 1969 alone the US military placed an order for 379,000,000 incendiary grenades (white phosphorous in particular, IIRC).

I don't know what that means (was the order to be filled in the same year? over the next few years? in general?). I do know that the US military used an immense amount of firepower during this specific war. Like 17,000,000 tons of explosive force, 370,000+ tons of napalm, compared to a little over 2,000,000 as were used by every major faction during the Second World War, including only 200,000 tons (~150,000 conventional, ~10,000 napalm, ~33,000 nuclear, I think...) on Japan's cities.

Which, you know, well, I won't make a gallows-humor remark but I will tell you that the USSBS (Strategic Bombing Survey) claimed it would only take 500 tons of bombs to devastate the average city. If low-yield nuclear weapons can range from 1,000 tons to even 10,000 tons, of TNT-equivalent explosive force (along with their other destructive energetic effects), and if the US was able to make a single high-yield weapon equivalent to 25,000,000 tons of TNT (in the past, this is true), then the military could easily end up making tens of thousands of "low-yield nuclear weapons" that still if unleashed in large numbers on specific targets could mimic explosions on an order of magnitude of 100,000 (maybe hundreds of thousands) tons of TNT. And keep in mind, this is just assuming that we're using 25,000,000 as the benchmark. It's not like the US didn't make tens of millions of tons of TNT-equivalents' worth more overall. In fact it might even be many tens or hundreds of millions (I don't remember the numbers I saw cited when I did the research but it was in those kinds of ranges). So for all I know, the US military could place an order for, IDK, 200,000 to 300,000 "low-yield" nuclear weapons on the 1,000-tons-of-TNT scale, which would be equal to 200,000,000/300,000,000 tons of TNT-equivalence. So if you fired 10,000 of these at a city, which would leave you with a great majority of these weapons regardless, you could simulate the detonation of a single 100,000 tons TNT-equivalent explosive, which would be like five or six times greater than the explosion set off in Hiroshima.

And the thing of it is... well... If the US put in an order for 379,000,000 grenades, in one year, during the Vietnam War---not normal grenades but incendiary ones--alongside all else it was manufacturing in terms of weaponry then... I feel like it would be easy for them to make at least something like 800,000 to 1,000,000 of these things (hell, do you really think 2,000,000 to 3,000,000, for that matter, would be totally unattainable?). Equip them to the Trident submarines somehow (I feel this wouldn't be incredibly impossible of an engineering problem to solve) and voila, "the most versatile nuclear arsenal/system on Earth," perhaps (I don't mean to say that someone has vouched for that phrase's usage yet, but that it sounds like a description the government would use to congratulate itself about what it had done).

I just learned the word "Centuriators" and I can't wait to come up with a way to apply it

The deontic transkeys

Another example of the kind of problem of which ingratiation is an example, is the problem of threatening. I will not dwell on the argument too much at the moment but the essence of the idea is that threatening someone is never justified (this is not identical to the question of whether defensive violence is acceptable) because doing so amounts to attempting to make something forbidden by doing something supererogatory [which is the obverse of ingratiation, then].

In general, these moral phenomena are known as deontic transkeys, in which one deontic operator is transkeyed to another, such that the dynamic of one operator is used to bring another into play. Under the circumstances, I have not had indifferential permission as transkeyed to the other operators, the idea being that since the why-glyph* is externally negated in this case, the why-force doesn't apply to it and so the mediation of the operators via the why-force doesn't take place here. So, given the other four deontic operators in the fundamental graph, there are 16 transkeys possible (assuming that each of those four can be transkeyed to itself). Some are true, the others are false; e.g., as noted, it is false to transkey supererogation to obligation or prohibition so as to be ingratiating or threatening. But OTOH supererogations can give rise to other supererogations; and so on. I'm not sure how many incorrect transkeys there are but whatever the number, those are all aspects of the Form of Evil's mathematical structure, I suspect.

*[The why-glyph is the conversion of an imperative, "Do X," into the question, "Why do X?" In the case of indifferential permission, since there is no reason why X and no reason why not X, X is not subject to the why-force as such. By contrast, in differential permission, the disjunct {X or not X} as a whole is what there is a reason for, so differential permission is subject thus to the why-force.]

Monster theory and Apollyon

According to the game-theoretic architecture of the multiverse and the divine realm, some lifeforms are physically possible as a relatively direct computation of the existential manifold of the possible economic sequences. That is, monsters are just beings computed into existence not due to the principle of original obligation (that is, deontic logic contains a theorem of particular duty, which requires that there always exist some agent or agents who are able to satisfy the duty) but due to the helping and harming theorems. Monsters therefore have roughly the following range of dispositions:

• Willing to heal others (H1).
• Can be provoked but otherwise helpful or neutral. (N1)
• Intermittently self-provoked; sometimes docile, sometimes feral, possibly with no discernible order to the exchanges (N2).
• Permanently hostile. (H2)

For example, all unicorns fall into (H1). Though technically all monsters have some form of free will, its physical manifestations are much more limited in range than for regular agents. Monsters are in a real way "game pieces" in the divine plenum of the world. This is why they are so significant throughout:

Now, the major distinction in monster theory is between monsters and supermonsters. The technical distinction is not between two absolutely weaker or stronger monster classes/types, since any monster can perform a maximum move in the Game (relative to its type), and all maximum moves are of equal deontic value simpliciter. Or, rather, internal to the H/N categories this is so. To illustrate, therefore, the idea is that the supermonsters are just those that can (A) perform a greater number of moves in general and (B) perform a greater number of maximum moves. So there is an abstract higher chance for a supermonster to perform a maximum move, at any given interval, than there is for a normal monster to do so.

It is common for people to think of the demiplane of Apollyon as a sort of supermonster. However, in the theory of the monster transet, this is not exactly so: Apollyon is referenced as the antimonster or the "empty monster" (on the analogy with the "empty note" soundex for the glyph of Apollyon*). Nevertheless...

As noted, besides Damnite and Armirex, five other Noumenal Artificers are counted as having Fallen. One of these did so in the early age of the multiverse, three more over various ensuing ages, and the fifth near the halfway mark between the day of genesis and the days of ascension. The first of these did so alongside the only three Fallen Metroarchs (so to speak) in history. The mistake that these agents made was this: in a mysterious assault on the demiplane of Apollyon, they attempted to divide the ecographic manifold of Apollyon's monster-theoretic identity into six pieces, one for each chord in the Song of Destruction. This succeeded in bringing about the Dirge-shadows, and after learning of what they had wrought, the four Fallen ones killed themselves in horror.

Just as the Form of Evil's crystal shadow in the physical world was used to contain the seraph hydra (the monster of the crystal), so was it used as part of the seal on Apollyon's power. Namely, if you represented the multiverse as a gameboard of some kind, then the location of the Veldaithemyr (the city that is the size of one entire of the 24 universes) is the location where the monster-gamepiece of the Destroyer is indexed (overlapped). And the idea is that this is a monster that can be "awakened" by an unwary "player"... But that stasis-in-waiting was imposed on Apollyon in part using the Form of Evil's own power to seal monsters. (Another major component was, of course, the rift in Cantor's staircase; but this too was entangled with the ancient darkness.)

When Apollyon awakens from the Veldaithemyr, therefore, it transforms the manifold of that city, part by part, into an icon incarnate of its (the Destroyer's) reality. It refashions the skyscrapers surrounding its heart into buildings equipped with massive weapons systems of various forms: missile arrays, lasers, energy-bolts, etc. all insomuch as these systems are implicit reflections of possible sinstone weapons systems.*** Because it has an "external" image for itself already (the city on the floating Mountain of Slaughter), it can manifest through the finitude (the Veldaithemyr is in one of the finite-size universes) of its surroundings without violating its infinite power.

[*In addition to a chromatic index, it is possible for an aleph-glyph to have a sound index or soundex (AKA an index of tonality). This is represented as a sound that is to be played whenever a soundexed glyph is especially displayed. In regions where electronic sound systems have yet to be developed, mathematicians who wish to indicate the range of specific indices of tonality usually carry with them an instrument known as an orchestrium, which is a sort of agglomerate of other kinds of musical instruments, reduced from their typical size to fit the scale of the orchestrium (as a handheld piece). Although not every transet has a soundex, Apollyon's aleph-number specifically has the soundex of silence itself (think of it like: the difference between not having a .wav file assigned to play when you click on the glyph, and having an empty .wav file assigned to play when you click on the glyph).

[***Not only did the Last War commence owing to the use of the Sin-gem, but many of the hostilities commenced and proceeded according to the development of a large number of sincrystal weapons systems. For example, the energy released from broken sinstones [the brick-shaped Dirge-shadow pieces] could be focused through a hosotopic lens (a spheration yielded by the special controlled action of a hosotopic wave) to form an extremely destructive kind of laser-like ray. Nevertheless, (most of?) the major factions using these weapons did not believe themselves to be servants of Apollyon, but professed that they were in some way trying to use Apollyon's own power to defeat the antimonster.]

Apollyon's argument

Inasmuch as the endgame of the story is a personal confrontation between Ripheus and Apollyon, what is the argument of the Destroyer in the end of days? One point that the Form of Destruction makes is that although Ripheus could use the Final Power to destroy that very Form, the City of Destruction in its totality is made of sincrystal, which means that breaking the entire City would unleash the ultimate nova of sincrystal power possible, one sufficient to annihilate all contingent reality in a flash. [This is more extreme than it sounds: the concept of the exchange specifically concerns the distinction between necessity and contingency, and the relationship between these concepts and the concept of free will---which in turn has implications for the ecology of moral logic at work overall, here. Think of how Armirex tries to interpose the Forms of Evil and Nothingness. Apollyon itself intends to interpose the Forms of Necessity and Contingency, so to say.] So, since Apollyon has no concept of what else Ripheus could do to halt the damnation of the cosmos, the Destroyer tries to convince Ripheus to let go of the Shield, commands the man to do so in fact. [However, Ripheus does not intend to kill Apollyon at all, anyway.]

Dr. Atatan

One subsetting of the story is supposed to be a "school for magic" kind of scenario. Actually, there are two examples of the trope at play, but anyway, the one I'm talking about is supposed to fit the profile more normally than the other. Now I'll confess, I'm actually only aware of the following examples in the genre: Harry Potter, scenes from The Magicians and Patrick Rothfuss' Kvothe books, maybe scenes from the tower of the Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time, and maybe some film or TV (or even videogame) examples I'm not clearly remembering right now. I feel like this is probably a short list (especially considering, IDK, anime and manga?) so I'm not sure if the following "personal touch" on the genre is original or not:

• The main antagonist is a professor.

He's not like Voldemort, then, a troubled student. I guess you could say he's like a combination of Voldemort and Dolores Umbridge or something, or that's the closest approximation, or whatever. However, there's more to it, like, it's not just that there happens to be a smart evil wizard (with or without state sanction) who poses obstacles for the students. It's rather that he's not a powerful wizard so much at all himself, and his primary negative activity is to try to influence his students into doing evil with magic.

And so more precisely, it's not even that this "Dr. Atatan" (working moniker) is getting his students to place curses on others or cast dark spells or what. Rather, the class he teaches has to do with "preparing for the advent of the Final Power." The idea is: we all know it'll happen one day, so what can we do to get ready for it? And Atatan has an evil idea, maybe he doesn't think it is, but it is.

In order for his idea to serve for some foreshadowing, I am (tentatively) setting it to this: just as it is later described, how Armirex attempts to interpose the concepts of evil and nothingness using a default in his moral logic, so it is that Atatan is misapplying the principles of the deontic operators---or, seeks to apply them in a warped way. The idea is that sometimes people try to impose obligations but doing supererogatory things. Like, you do someone a major "favor" so they feel "obligated" to you accordingly. Now, on a technical level, it's already wrong---you can't deduce an obligation from a supererogation like that, in pure logical space---but it is more substantively wrong, too. I.e. it (A) conflicts with the autonomy of those on whom the "obligations" are imposed (their responsibility for which obligations they are under), (B) often involves overlooking the fact that what "seems" beyond the call of duty, as far as generosity or whatever goes, is really what we owe under the circumstances anyway, and (C) often involves getting others to feel "obligated" to do something that is itself wrong (think of crime bosses leaning on civilians, say, or the matter of Satanic temptation in general (so to speak)).

Now, Atatan would then be trying to convince his students to prepare to use the Final Power so that the power of supererogation directly computes the power of obligation, contrary to the above, or resulting in this. In essence, he'd be trying to corrupt the concept of supererogation itself (a fairly malevolent act, I suspect...). This has a theoretical-apocalyptic relevance: the normal ratio of good operators to the evil operator is 2:1 (there is only one operator for evil, the prohibition operator, but two for good---for obligation and supererogation). More importantly, in Morettian space (the space of all possible deontic graphs of n dimensions), all the operators above the first four (obligated, prohibited, permitted differently, permitted indifferently) are in the class of supererogation (since the principle of construction for the supererogation operator simpliciter is equivalent to the principle of construction for the ascending sequence of graphs), which makes the ratio of good to evil infinite. So, the Form of Evil has a vested interest in trying to subvert the concept of supererogation, and its metaphysical influence on Atatan contributes to his deluded plan.

As it turns out, Atatan has access to a "Simon chair." These are named in honor (or memory...) of a man named Simon [something or other] who was uniquely tortured by both Lawclest Damnite and Vyrian Armirex. The symmetry of their sin was that Damnite tortured people to cause magic to happen, whereas Armirex used magic to cause people to be tortured. So that, in some way, was what Simon went through (it was by this act that the two Fallen Artificers determined that compounding their powers, against Apollyon, would be of great worth: so not only did they torment Apollyon physically and magically, but they used the direction-of-force (magic-to-pain) to fuel the other one (pain-to-magic). Since one of the final offenses (the set-codex of the Form of Evil) is recursive disgrace, or a wrongful concept of punishment, Armirex to some extent channeled the power of the Form of Evil to torture his victims. [Which would contribute to his later knowledge of how to use the power of the Form of Evil + the Keyscape, to silence Apollyon.] Simon chairs, then, are designed to channel the same energy, for the reasons of Armirex and Damnite together.

Sophie's choice in the Ripheus story

This is extremely relevant to an issue having to do with the ecographic nature of the Form of Evil. Now as it stands, the intuition one is "supposed" to get from the case is that Sophie will feel guilty no matter what she does. This might be because she will never know if she subconsciously chose the one child over the other for some reason, and so she will feel guilt about the quality of her love for the child she didn't choose, or something along these lines.

But let's suppose she knows she's not choosing one over the other due to some deficit of love for either, or whatever. Should she still feel guilty? One might think she should feel guilty because she has brought about the death of a child she loves. But I think that this is a terrible thing, to think that she should be made to feel guilt on top of everything else under the circumstances.

Now, as far as Ripheus and his world go, the issue is generally over whether there are objective moral dilemmas at all. Of course there are subjective dilemmas where one doesn't know what to do. The existence of objective dilemmas involves a denial of something called "agglomeration" in deontic logic. Roughly, the idea is that from, "You ought to do x," and, "You ought to do ~x," you can infer, "You ought to do (x and ~x)," which means, "You ought to make it true that x and true that ~x," or, "You ought to make it true that (x and ~x)," which is a contradiction.

There is an argument over agglomeration so the deeper logical defense of the proposition, in the Ripheus setting, is this: in imperative logic, +A and +B = +(A and B). Any two commands can be represented as one command to do two things. Since erotetic logic encodes for the transcendental deduction of deontic logic from imperative logic, the imperative agglomeration carries over into the deontic context.

As far as Sophie goes, the issue adverts to this: Sophie actually doesn't know that what she says will decide which child will be killed. Not only could the Nazi kill the opposite child (to spite the mother somehow, suppose), or both regardless, or one a little later, or by sheer random free will neither, but even if he accords with the mother's "choice," this is by his actual choice. So yes, it is perversely unsympathetic towards her, to attribute a "moral remainder" or "moral residue" to her as if nevertheless these arithmetical or chemical analogies didn't have to follow the laws of division or admixture in turn. [And so the ultimate way the Form of Evil tries to warp a person is by infecting their sense of responsibility so that they begin to think of their inactions as negatively morally charged, due to irrevocable dilemmas, which starts to physically and spiritually subvert the person's free will from within itself. The negative charge hypothesis converts into a misalignment of the fundamental concepts of good and evil in a person's logical reasoning, namely it only goes through if the concept of evil is the basis of the concept of good, which is false. Therefore, this amounts to an interposition of the concept of evil and the concept of inaction such that evil seems to "exist as nonexistence," so to speak. Again, Armirex was not spinning his plan out of nothingness(!)...]

Tardigrade-monads

Microscopic lifeforms that manifest in the indefinite-sized universes. They are the "natural prey" of the leviathan hydrae, a set of prion-like pathogens that are also Dirge-shadows. When a tardigrade-monad effectively fights a leviathan hydra, or whenever else a leviathan hydra is dissolved, the hydra releases a small wave of energy that can damage cells around it. Extensive exposure to these waves causes a skin condition known as Apophis syndrome, in which skin cells become highly sensitive to exposure to red light and are electrically charged in an abnormal manner. Long-term untreated Apophis syndrome has a massive chance of fatality.

The Dirge-shadows

The six classes of sincrystal, which are objects that if broken, melted, etc. release a burst of Apollyon's pure destructive power. Each is associated with a different ecographic style (metroarchic, economic, deminomic, metrometric, ecometric, and ecoarchic).

• The Typhon. Metroarchic.
• Flamesand. Used for one of the Sinkorosst (the planar bindings on the Typhon). Appears as a thin layer of red sand in some desert regions. When grains of flamesand are melted together into glass, this is considered "destroying" them, so melting them is what brings forth the wave of Apollyon's energy. Metrometric.
• The leviathan hydrae ["Apophis particulates"]. Microscopic sub-living things. Ecometric.
• Sinstone in general. Economic.
• The Void of Threnody. Deminomic.
• The Shield. Held by Ripheus. A literal hand-held shield. Uniquely weakest of the Dirge-shadows, it cannot be destroyed by anything save the Final Power, and even if it could be destroyed, it would release the weakest wave of Apollyon's energy. [Legends suggest a number of obscure origins for the Shield, namely it is commonly, and mistakenly, judged to be a sincrystal construct admixed with something else [ore from the Labyrinth, petrified wood from the aleph-forest, ceramic from objects in Cantor's house, compacted unicorn-horn dust, ortholithic [Form of Adventure-like] matter, residue deposited by tardigrade-monads, exotic metrometric crystal, the "bones" of the Form of Fear, etc. or perhaps even some combination of any or all of the above.]

The Unicorn Archons

A faction among in the ecometers who are devoted to protecting the pegasus seraph.

What is wrong with Armirex's reasoning

There's more to the problem than just, "Let's replace the concept of evil with the concept of nothingness." Armirex sort of already BELIEVES the privation-of-being theory of evil, in that he defines evil not as "the opposite of" but as "the absence of" the good. However, the fundamental principle of the concept of difference in itself is, "Absences and opposites are different differences." And the true concept of evil is not "not good" but "anti-good."

So, in deontic logic, the operators OBLIGATED (Ob), PERMITTED, (Pm), FORBIDDEN (Fr), and so on, all have interrelations. For example, you might say that something is obligated, Ob(x), just in case it is not permitted to not do it, ~Pm(~x). [Although, to be sure, such a negative relational definition would make goodness itself into a form of nothingness...] The fundamental semantics for the deontic operators are grounded in the simple interfunctions of the deontic syntax in general and the syntax of basic propositional logic in the operators AND, NOT, and OR. So, something is obligated if and only if there is a reason to do it, Ob(x); if there is no reason to do something, and no reason not to, that thing is indifferently permitted ~Ob(x) & ~Ob(~x) = Pm(x); something might have a reason to or to not do it inside itself, which is differentially permitted*, Ob(x \/ ~x); something might have a reason to not do it, Ob(~x) = Fr(x). And there's a fifth "simple" formula (relying only on the simplest interchanges of the basic logical operators), here, which I won't spell out but it corresponds to something being "supererogated," beyond the call of duty/an act of grace. AFAIK these are the only 5 moral descriptions of an action that can be constructed from simple logical forms as such.

So, in Armirex's mind, since evil is nothingness, somehow, he doesn't draw the distinction between the two spheres of permission as he should, and thence neither is his identification of moral negation (Fr(x)) is compromised, too. Wherefore, in a way, you could say his attempt to destroy the Form of Evil by fusing it with the Form of Nothingness, also amounts to attempting to fuse the Form of Evil with the Form of Permission.

The supercolor superparenthesis

﴿...﴾ 

are parenthetical glyphs used in a number of exotic functions in higher transet theory. It was eventually determined that superparentheticals have a chromatic index, but only for the four colors red, blue, green, and yellow. The only other glyphs known to cartoglyphers to have a chromatic index are the isoset semiosis (the "musical" transet).

... A special mapping relating to Apollyon is that taking the Apollyon glyphset to the power of the first musical number, equals the Apollyon number with a glyphdex of ♪_♪ which would be one of the only known cases of a musical number functioning as a glyphdex (or of a chromatic index being emphasized at all).

۞ꙮ

꙲

ﷺ

...other cool symbols I found ...

The Battle of el Samir

Explain a plot badly:

"An Odium-Sephiroth hybrid uses a Ruin-Worm of the World's End hybrid to attack a Dark One-Morgoth hybrid." --- explanation of the Riphean endgame

1. The Preface to This Resistance
2. The Axioms of Paradise
3. Reason's Trinities
4. A Tower of Fire Defy
5. In the Days of Ascension
6. Seven Fallen
7. Of Their Dominion
8. Will Always Be
9. Alas! the Broken
10. Herald the End
11. Ask Why This Should Be
12. For the Sake of Three Things
13. Nothing Instead
14. The Darkness Not
15. To Heaven to Go
16. To Take a Stand
17. Wherefore Apollyon et Ripheus...

[Hypothetical list of titles for the series. OTOH I'm not sure I've come up with 17 books' worth of material, even in principle. I.e. the demiplane of Apollyon is book 1, 2 through 4 are the Precentor trilogy, 5 through 7 are the Septatheon trilogy, 8 through 10 are the Keyscape trilogy, 10 and 11 are the evil schoolteacher duology, the Dirge-shadow known as the Void of Threnody storyline is somewhere in the next set [IDK if I've mentioned the Dirge-shadows yet here?], as well as the conclusion to Bassilfastion's quest and the buildup to the awakening of Apollyon (that latter is at the end of 16).]

"For the Sake of Three Things": the unholy trinity of the final offenses. Three interlocking (perichoretic) sins, whose personification is the so-called Form of Evil.

"The evil of corruption is negating the essence of goodness in something; the evil of destruction is negating the existence of goodness as something." "But it is possible to think of destroying the properties that make something good without replacing them with other properties that would be evil; the evil is all in the destruction of the good properties, not their replacement or lack thereof. So would not Apollyon be the actual Form of Evil?"

I was reading a book about logic and apparently I misremembered the symbol for possibility in standard modal logic. The square is used for necessity, whereas a diamond is used for possibility. :/