Annnnnddd part four is out!!! Sorry it took so long. “Hopefully this month,” very quickly turned into, “Hopefully this year,” which very quickly turned into “Hopefully before the end of January 2025.” Did finally finish it though, but it did take a 1 am rant to my friends who had no clue what the fuck I was talking about (if you guys are seeing this,,, thanks for listening to my insanity).
This post is just a collection of all the parts of the timeline. I’ll come back and edit it every time I post a new part. Working on Part 5 right now, but I’m not going to make any promises because we can all see how well I stuck to deadlines last time.
Why Ludmilla? And why does this really matter? *Does* it really matter?
Not particularly. What matters is that there was an evil life after those lives, so we have to take off one of our number. (Leaving us with 16 evil lives to go!) And I hear you now; if it doesn’t matter who it was, then why are you mentioning it? Well, because it gives us a definitive location for Maugris during the time he was Ludmilla. It helps us track Maugris through Europe.
And I’m trying to the best of my ability to find this bitch.
So, again, why Ludmilla?
Well, of the known makars Maugris jumped into, we have definitive names for two.
By my line of thinking, there are only two people it could have possibly been. Ludmilla and that other bitch I can’t remember the name of right now. (Remember the part in Golden Tower where they’re reading through the book of Evil Mages and Call is specifically like: Yea I was these two people? Like SPECIFICALLY them when their name is mentioned? Struck me as odd, because there were a lot of evil mages that were in that book that got read out, but they single out Specifically Them. Two mages. And hey what do you know, I just so happened to have places for two breaks in my theory. And hey what do you know, they had to be two renowned people who would have been recognized. AND HEY, WHAT DO YOU KNOW, CALL REMEMBERED THEIR NAMES SPECIFICALLY WHILE HE WAS BEING BOMBARDED WITH MEMORIES AND WAS DISORIENTED AS HELL, IMPLYING THEY WERE IMPORTANT. THE MAGISTERIUM IS NEVER MENTIONED TO HAVE HISTORY CLASSES, OR LIKE EVIL MAGE HISTORY CLASSES OR ANYTHING. HOW ELSE WOULD HE KNOW THEM IF NOT FROM HIS OWN MEMORY? IS THIS A STRETCH? YES. BUT ITS WHAT IM GOING WITH BECAUSE ALL THESE LITTLE THINGS LINING UP MAKES ME FEEL INSANE.) For a while, I was pretty much at a dead end. There isn’t much in the books about Maugris’ past lives, aside from Call’s confirmation that he was definitely Ludmilla and definitely that other bitch. Pretty much all we know about Ludmilla was that she set a hoard of beetles on Prague in revenge against her best friend’s ex husband. (Which is…weirdly specific and not at all specific at the same time. It tells me everything and nothing. Like it tells me that at the time divorce was possible.)
So, with no more canon material to dig through, I turned to the real world instead. And oh what do you know, there was a beetle outbreak in Prague in the 1870s.
Abstract. Based on documentary evidence, a chronology of bark
beetle outbreaks in the Czech Republic from 1781 to 1963 CE was created,
conti
Coincidence? I. THINK. NOT!!!!
(Actually yes. I think yes. No way in hell were Holly Black and Cassandra Claire researching beetle outbreaks in Prague while writing this. Or if they were, (hell, maybe that’s where the idea came from) they weren’t doing their math. That’s what this series is built off, I swear. A bunch of coincidences that just so happen to kind of line up sometimes.)
So, Ludmilla curses her friends ex husband in 1870, and Maugris hears about her sometime between then and 1884, which is when he makes the jump. I’m guessing Ludmilla did this, had 14 years to get notorious for it (and likely called all kinds of things and villainized—the past hasn’t exactly been kind to woman). Maugris saw all the chaos (hah. Chaos.) decided he needed in on that, and became her. Where was he for those fourteen years? No idea. As we get farther and farther from established canon, it gets harder and harder to track things in ways that don’t involve a bunch of guessing. Finding concrete answers was hard before, but it’s damn near impossible now. All I can hope now is that my leaps in logic are just that: logical.
Feel free to disagree with those leaps of logic. I am aware that some of my arguments here are not the most structurally sound in some areas. Hopefully it doesn’t totally break the theory.
My personal guess for why Ludmilla was remembered so well even though she did something that would be…not insignificant to the people affected but doesn’t really matter to everyone else is a combination of sexism and discrimination against makars in Europe that would have been going on at the time—either she was the reason they were banned or they were banned before her and she spent her childhood/teens hiding it and it was eventually revealed when she snapped and did what she did. It would make sense for her to be remembered well enough to be one of the names that were pulled from the book in Golden Tower if she was the reason Makars were banned in Europe. That would make sense as the reason that after her is a bunch of rest lives. Maugris stirred up too much shit all at once, and to keep people from catching on our skeleton stealer took a break.
Next time, I’m going to get into some more evil lives, and maybe try and better figure out what the fuck he was doing for the 14 years his ass was missing.
On a scale from 1-10 how insane do I sound?
Timeline
-Cold Massacre in 2002
-Constantine gets a soul replacement in 1998
-Maugris leaves Europe in 1971
-woman gets her body stolen in 1966
-Maugris body hops in 1930
-Maugris body hops in 1912
-Maugris body hops in 1899
-Makars get banned in Europe somewhere between 1884 and 1899 (maybe? This is my best guess, but I could be totally wrong about that)
The woman I mentioned before is likely European. I think this for a number of reasons, one of which being she is a makar who is deliberately hiding her gifts. Joseph never once suspected what she was, and Maugris didn’t jump into children, so he couldn’t have been making the choice to hide it. And why would she hide it in the U.S? It’s celebrated, there wouldn’t really be a reason to. You could say to avoid fighting, but The Enemy didn’t exist yet, and there hadn’t been any notable evil makars for a couple generations because Maugris was laying low. A likely explanation is the European ban on Makars. This is actually really helpful because it tells us when Maugris left Europe and came to the U.S. It had to have been AFTER 1966, and if we’re using the five year gap logic from before with her age, that would put Maugris leaving Europe at around 1971.
Now, this is where things get…messy.
All we know about the past lives after that woman is that
(1) Maugris was laying low. This actually is an important detail because it tells us a lot about the life prior to “laying low” lives. This is a guess, but based off of maugris’s character it seems likely that he wouldn’t just decide to lay off the evil for a while. I mean, this guy had literally no qualms about consistently murdering innocents. That means that for him to just stop for a while, the last “evil” life he had had to have made a huge impact. This significantly narrows down what “Several Generations” can mean. (Note: I think that these ‘breaks’ were not common for him. He started all this when he was young and probably didn’t figure out about the take a break thing for a while.)
And
(2) Maugris’s known, documented lives are generally focused on the evil ones. We don’t really get names for anything else, so what we need to figure out is how often he reaches extremes that would force him to take a break from evil doing. To do this, we need to find which life came directly before the laying low ones, or how many evil lives he’s lived and figure out the proportions compared to normal lives he’s lived.
Thankfully, we do have actual text confirming a number. (For once.)
In Golden Tower, at the bottom of page 154, Call says he’s been 17 different evil mages, and Aaron helpfully corrects that number to 18.
“‘…Even though I’ve been seventeen different evil mages.’
‘Eighteen,’ said Aaron. ‘But who’s counting?’”
This specific quote is very important, not just because it holds one of the only concrete numbers in this series, but also because of the specification. Notice that Call doesn’t say he’s been 17 different mages, but that he’s been 17 different *evil* mages. An important distinction, because it tells us whether Call is being counted or not. If he *were* being counted, Aaron’s correction would consist of one less life, not one more. Throughout the entire book, Aaron is in Call’s head trying to convince him that he’s not evil, what Maugris did doesn’t reflect on him. It wouldn’t make sense for him to be saying this constantly and then undermine his own point later with that comment. Plus, he’s been in Call’s head for months at this point, he’s seen the amount he’s struggled because of being labeled “evil.” Even if he knew Call would be okay with it, it just…doesn’t strike me as something he would do. So, Call is not being counted. (And also, if Aaron’s correction counted Call, he’d say 19. If he were counting Call, there would still be a missed life. Of course, Aaron’s correction could just be in reference to just Call, but I’ve already went over why I don’t think that. You could say it was just a joke and these numbers don’t even matter, but the correction of 18 proves it’s not just a casual comment—if it’s just a joke with no truth to it, why correct it at all? And why specifically with 18? I think that 18 is the actual number, and it would make sense for him to know and not Call—he was kinda busy being bombarded with memories to accurately count, it makes sense he would miss one.)
So 18 lives, not including Call.
Based off of the flashbacks and names Call yells during them, 9 of those lives were spent evil overlording. That leaves the remaining 9 to be in-between years (and also the woman.) So, of the named generations, nine of them were spent being actively evil and one of them was a rest generation. The remaining 8 generations were also likely rest ones. Our creepy carcass connoisseur really got around.
Before I move on, I think it’s important to note that while Aaron separated out Call from the number of “evil mages” Maugris was, it’s unlikely he did the same for the rest generations. This is because of his personal connection to Call, and the unique circumstances surrounding his swap. Call is, for all purposes, a functionally different person than Maugris, even though they share the same soul. It wouldn’t have been like that for the lives he laid low in, and it didn’t mean that he wasn’t still being actively evil and scheming in those years, it just meant he was being more on the down-low about it.
Now that we’ve established there were nine evil lives and nine rest generations, we can begin to try to put together some semblance of an order.
We know that for several generations (including the woman’s life) prior to Constantine was a rest life. I think that for these rest generations to be at all effective, they would have to last AT LEAST three lifetimes. Why? Because for the idea to even work, you would need all those with first hand accounts to die off. From the number of rest years, and the fact that at least three would be needed for each time he skipped, I think it’s likely he only did the breaks like two, maybe three times, at most. (Personally, I think it was two (I’ll explain why in a later part) but that’s up for interpretation.) That significantly narrows down unaccounted for time, and gives us a clearer picture of when some of those evil lives had to take place.
We know that before the woman, there were “several generations” of laying low. This is where I’m going to put four of the rest generations. (Yes, the other five have a place, I just haven’t gotten there yet. And yes, splitting it unevenly WAS intentional. There’s a reason four go here.) and then one evil life.
From here, I looked up average life expectancies from the sixties back.
Abstract. Background In the past, upward shifts of the so-called Preston curve, which relates life expectancy to national income, have contr
The term “generations” can mean different things depending on life expectancy. A generation today is expected to live longer than generations from the early 1900s, so we have to take into account how long a body he took would be able to live. If he was taking bodies in their 20s or 30s, the amount of time he could spend there before the body died off would be greatly reduced. Since there is no way to really tell for which generations he was which gender, I’m going to use the male estimate when numbers vary by only 1 or two years. When estimates vary for larger amounts of time, I’m going to average those estimates.
In the 1960s, lifespan for men and woman combined was about 66 years. If Maugris took over a body at 30 and left at the average life span, he would’ve been in that body for a total of 36 years. Subtract the established 1966 by 36 and we get another body hop occurring around 1930. In 1930, the average lifespan was around 43, meaning Maugris would’ve been in that body for about 18 years. As we get further back, I think Maugris would’ve entered bodies younger due to less life expectancy. So, instead of 30 being point of entry from here on I’m going to use 25. 18 years back from 1930 was 1912.
¡WARNING! CRAZY CONSPIRACY RANT BELOW
1912 I say??? WELL YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN 1912!?! THE FUCKING TITANIC. TIME TO FINALLY REACH ONE OF MY LONGEST HELD HEAD CANONS ABOUT THIS MAN.
Maugris is a meat hopper, we all know that. He could be anything or anyone at any time. I could be Maugris. You could be Maugris. YOUR CAT COULD BE MAUGRIS. WE ARE ALL MAUGRIS.
When I read the Golden Tower the first time, I ran across the scene where Maugris is standing on a sinking boat and there’s elementals in the sea. This immediately set my crazy conspiracy senses tingling. I wasn’t until I read the scene again that things finally clicked for me. The titanic. It just gave titanic, and once the thought was there it just wouldn’t leave. Like an annoying fly, constantly buzzing around my head. I tried to disprove it. There’s mentions of an armada burning in the background. The Titanic is kinda notorious for sinking via iceberg.
But.
There are many theories that before the ship even set sail, that there was a coal fire on it. If there was one, doesn’t that make it possible for there to be another?
No, I thought. No.
It very clearly sank via iceberg. Also, there were no other ships around (at least, not ones that could be considered a part of any type of armada.)
And yet.
Maugris was in Europe at the time, so it’s not crazy to believe he may have heard about a supposedly invincible ship. Maugris liked invincible things. He thought *he* was invincible. Plus, according to my math, he body hopped in 1912. Was he on the boat and then body hopped into someone who got off?
Possibly.
Is there any canon backing for this?
Not really.
Do I choose to believe this because the mental image of Maugris trying to fit on Rose’s door makes me laugh?
Yes.
Do with that what you will.
END RANT
In 1910, the average life expectancy was 38 years. If Maugris body hopped into a person who was 25, he would’ve spent 13 years in that body. 13 years before 1912 is 1899. In 1900, life expectancy was 40 years. This gives us 15 years of time Maugris spent in that body. This puts us at 1884.
So, we’ve found the end of several rest generations. This next life was an openly evil one. There’s no real way to know for sure which evil mage it was, but I have a guess. It would have to be someone who made enough of an impact to make Maugris take a break, but not enough of one to be vividly remembered (by the U.S.) 4 generations later. This would be the last evil mage that Maugris was in Europe, likely who got Makars banned. Someone who was distant enough to not be the first thought when you consider evil makars. Who do I think this was?
