The Five-fold Symbol
| Type | Emblem |
|---|---|
| Origin | Unknown |
| Properties | Marks the Sacred Head; measures her connection to the Sacred Books |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
The Five-fold Symbol is five gold circles woven into one another. It is the emblem of everything Sacred in Eslura, where it is called the Sacred Symbol, and it is the mark that a Sacred Head carries on her wrist.[1]
Design
Five interlocking rings, drawn as circles of gold and glowing with a light of their own. The rings pulse, dimming and brightening; where the symbol is carved into stone a golden mist cascades out of it, and its power can be felt on the skin from several paces away.[2] Beatrice Tidal first found the word for the shape on Earth, searching the internet for something that matched the mark following her about: a five-fold, and nothing more than that.[3]
The mark worn by Obellius Kalaar's followers is not the same and should not be mistaken for it. It has two intertwining circles rather than five, split through the middle, described variously as pierced by a fork in a road, by a 'Y' and by a split tree.[4][5][6]
What it signifies
To bear the Sacred Symbol is to hold a Sacred title, and Eslurians read it that way on sight. Alpin Loomin treats it as an obligation rather than an honour, telling Bea that since she bears the Sacred Symbol she had better know her enemies.[7]
What the five rings themselves stand for is never explained. The count matches Eslura's beginning: Aezaros used the Eyearke Stone to make a settlement of five people, remembered as the first inhabitants of Eslura and its very first Rulers and Head.[8] The last mural left standing in The Sacred City sets the four Sacred Rulers on pedestals with an element above each head and their arms outstretched toward a ball of gold light, a faint five-fold outlined around it.[9] The books never join the two.
The mark of the Sacred Head
The Head wears the symbol on the right wrist, its gold circles embedded in the skin rather than drawn on it.[1] Only one person carries it at a time. When Lumikki Otsby shared a cell with a sick woman who kept turning over a bare wrist to look at it, she was sitting beside Amelia Lunala, the former Sacred Head, whose mark had passed to Bea.[10][11]
The mark is also a gauge. Alistair Archibald explained that it works on a spectrum, gold as full and black as empty, reading the Head's own energy and her connection to the Books. A Shadow Reaper's claw across it drove Bea's symbol brown and left part of the Reaper inside her; laying her hand on the Heart of the Book of Land brought the colour back to a rusty orange, and Alistair told her it would recharge itself from there.[12][13]
Powers
- A door. The symbol followed Bea for years on Earth, visible to nobody else, appearing on a clock face, on a grocery bag and in yellow marker on a seatback.[3] It was inscribed on the wall of a cave near Camp Tossbridge, and when she put her hand to it the stone swallowed her arm and pulled her through into Eslura.[2] The opening she was pulled through is The Cave Portal.
- A shield. Demise brought his axe down on Bea's open hand. The symbol flashed gold, the blade did not so much as scratch her, and Demise stumbled backwards.[14]
- An undoing. The gold light out of the symbol struck Demise and his hounds and broke the spell Obellius had cast on them, returning shapes they had worn so long they had forgotten them.[11]
Whether these are powers of the symbol or of the Head who wears it is not settled anywhere in the books.
Where it appears
The symbol runs through everything the Sacred left behind. It is the clasp that joins The Sacred Cloak at the breast and the pattern embroidered along its outer seams.[15] It is painted in flaking gold on the wardrobe in Amelia Lunala's room in the Sacred City, and set in the stained-glass window there, of which half survives.[15] Faded Sacred Symbols mark the ceremonial banners the survivors of the Sacred City have cut down for tent cloth.[9]
It also appears where nobody put it. Bea saw it in a dream: five interlocking rings shooting flames into the night sky and crumbling to the ground piece by piece, watched by a crowd of thirty or so who stood with their backs to her.[16] Later, learning to hold her power steady, she grew grass and vines out of a broken wall in the Sacred City and let them braid themselves into a five-fold, gold petals bursting open along the stalks.[11]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Book 1, Ch. 8.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Book 1, Ch. 4.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Book 1, Ch. 2.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 7.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 11.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 19.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 13.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 24.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Book 2, Ch. 5.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 12.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Book 2, Ch. 28.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 22.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 24.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 20.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Book 2, Ch. 9.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 14.