I have a theory about Renascent’s identity that isn’t a shitpost this time. I’ve been spending my rereads looking for clues about her, and I did find one that I haven’t seen anyone talking about. It’s impossible it’s a coincidence, but Seth is very deliberate about word choice, so I’m inclined to believe it’s an intentional hint. In Traitor, Svirakir makes the comment, when telling Baru Falcrest’s “favorite method” to draw out the disloyal, that “If that enemy is a United Stakhieczi invasion, or a renascent Tu Maia empire out of the west, or the menace from across the Mother of Storms - well, we cannot risk division in a moment of crisis.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of this at first, since the Tu Maia had their downfall hundreds of years ago, and the idea of one of their descendents - namely a Taranoki or an Invijay - being Renascent seemed substantially low. But then I remembered a comment Seth made during a Reddit AMA in response to whether we’ve met Renascent yet, in which they said “depending on how you define ‘met’, we’ve met her twice.” I tried to think of who we have met twice, in various shape or form, and how that could tie into the Tu Maia empire comment, and I had a lightbulb moment.
We’ve met the ‘emperor’ of Falcrest twice - the first time it was Farrier, and the second time it was Baru.
Now, the whole thing with the emperor is that they’re not real. They tell the public that it’s an amnesiac, lobotomied person who represents the true will of the empire, but it’s the cryptarchs who secretly run the show.
The will of the empire. Renascent is the will of the empire.
She’s not human. She’s a tulpa, or perhaps something even more bizarre, simply a concept or theorem, that represents all of Falcrest and Incrasticism. This makes sense given the timeline we have, because in Monster it’s mentioned that she initiated the period of Rebirth, a purge of all the cryptarchs at the time, “a few decades back.” She would have had to have accumulated a lot of power by that point, so she’d have to be pretty old. And we know that Falcrest loves savants; also in Monster, Farrier mentions that he only has about a decade left, at the age of 54, before he’d be forced to abdicate his position, because they don’t believe old people should have much political power. She would have to be something other than human to be a cryptarch this long.
This would also be a great thematic contrast to the Cancrioth and their immortata. They - along with the Tain Hu tulpa - would do a great job of hinting towards Renascent’s inevitable reveal; the necessary pieces to understand what’s going on are already on the board, we just have to slot them together. And this could play into Farrier and Cosgrad’s fears that civilization may end soon, because Renascent is Falcrest, and if she pins their future on the wrong theorem, it could be game over, besides the obvious looming threat of a second Armada War. And if you really want to drive the Tu Maia connection further, you could argue that she has been around since those days, maybe once representing their entire empire, before their downfall, and evolving into Falcrest. I think that’s too far-fetched even for me to believe, though, but worth throwing out there in case someone else wants to run with it.
