How To Revive Mr Candles
anonymous|Posted on Dec 10 2022 at 7:19 pm
Putting aside what options the game itself is equipped to provide us, and just talking in terms of theoretical canon-compliance... well, this is the Neath, and the point of the Neath is to be a refuge for the audacious and the impossible. So if we wanted to resurrect the Curator formerly known as Candles, how would we go about it?
1) There are apparently still some physical remains of Mr Candles. The path of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name disregards this completely, mentioning it early but then never doing anything about it; the feverish mission of SMEN is one of remembrance or retribution, not of resurrection. And yet. "IT IS NORTH UNDER GRANITE." Probably in Xibalba, if you have a skilled enough archeologist to go dig it up. Of course, that'll still be just a corpse.
2) The vitality of the Mountain of Life, combined with the blood of a Curator and a number of specially-prepared candles, can wake the dead, even those who have been dead for quite some time. We know this textually. The only problem is that, in the example we have, something is lost. To get Mr Candles back, we'd have to recover that "something". But in his case... it may be lost, but it's not gone.
3) The living regrets of the Bazaar, in which Mr Candles was drowned, still denote him homeopathically, if you've got a good enough Correspondent to read him back out of the lacre. Even if "lacre cannot bury the law", the railway to Hell uncovered something that can; a Steward's help may also be necessary, but there are Stewards around. I suspect, though, that this will be an incomplete remnant - filtered through the melancholy of the Bazaar's liquid sorrow. We'll need another flavor to balance it out.
4) Every human who posed a mortal threat to a Curator - whether October or the various Ambition protagonists - did it in Parabola; the Masters are vulnerable to it, and to the possibility of part of themselves being left behind there. Parabola was Mr Candles's _specialty_, once upon a time, and thus, some impression of him apparently remains there, or else wouldn't people dream of Death by Water. Get a good enough Glassworker to find the center of that dream, and I bet you'll find something suitable for the job. On its own, it's probably the vengeful aspect of Mr Eaten, which seems to play tug-of-war against the mournful aspect in the canonical Seeking Road. But even then, there's still a problem: you've got these remnants of Mr Candles's heart and mind, and you've got his body coming back to life... but how do you put them together again?
5) One of the impossible colors of the Neath has a tendency to lubricate thoughts and memories - to make them slippery, easy to slip in and out of minds. Going to the Nadir would be the wrong move here, I think; it's too hard to control the effects down there, too easy to lose all the precious ingredients that took so much effort to gather. Instead, you'd need measured, expert application of Irrigo. Would the help of a Midnighter, with their experience in the rites of St Joshua, be enough? Perhaps. Or perhaps one would have to lean, just a little, on the Seeking Road, to lure St Eruzile's irrigo-drenched remnant out of hiding. She would know. Is that enough? Maybe there's some hitches in the plan that I haven't yet noticed. Maybe the candles and the blood should be counted as their own steps. Maybe we shouldn't get so excited about sevens. But there's something there. Something that might end better than the Seeking Road and its apparent (at least, to me, who has no idea what's _really_after King of Ways) end goal of "getting revenge by calling the cops".
