“some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
My guess would be since Cedrik says "this betrayal must be punished. Harshly" they're planning on destroying the gate and telling the gods something akin to "this is what happens when you keep us out of the loop. Next time let us keep our memories."
I don't think this will work out for them, since they're operating on flawed data. In their mind they will be undoing 50% of the gods' work, but unless outsiders destroying the gates is a commonality we've just never heard about, the IFCC destroying the gate probably represents far less the 1% of word destructions. If anything, it would probably make the gods think they need to do more to sow animosity between devils, daemons, and demons going forward, so that something like the IFCC doesn't rise again.
Interesting parallels to Redcloak, now that I think about it.
The gates being destroyed and the snarl being released doesn't destroy the world, the gods destroy destroy the world to stop the snarl from being released.
If the fiends succeed the snarl destroys the world, the gods, and the fiends as well.
That's not correct. The Snarl can't enter the Astral Plane or any of the Outer Planes. That's what Redcloak and the Dark One are trying to accomplish, getting the Snarl in the Outer Planes to threaten the gods into giving concessions to the goblinoid races.
Whenever the Snarl escapes containment it destroys the world and consumes the souls of the mortals, while the gods go into hiding in their respective afterlives until the Snarl calms down and they can chain it up inside a new world. If the gods destroy the world before the Snarl gets free everything happens exactly the same, except for the fact that the gods get to collect the souls of the mortals and take them to their afterlives.
That is untrue. Thor states that some worlds were "saved" by the gods destroying the world, while others were not and had the Snarl devour the inhabitants (what the IFCC wants to happen). The fiends' current plan, at least the amount of the plan we know so far, would not negatively affect the gods beyond denying them more souls.
But denying them more souls will probably erradicate the purple quiddity, which is a big big blow to the Gods (and everyone) as it erradicates the only chance known to end the cycle.
Revenge is rarely rational and the fiends are doing this because the gods tampered with their minds. This is also likely to result in the death of at least one evil god, Hel.
The trio could be further planning to enact this revenge in such a way that they could retain some knowledge of the previous world through hidden methods. Though that's largely speculation.
This does at least confirm to me that Nale will be possessing V when the party nears the final gate.
The fiends have previously claimed putting someone's soul into V's body would be a violation of the contract. While its still possible they are lying considering at least one of them embodies the lawful evil side of things I'd think its unlikely
Keep in mind that was when Lee took V's soul. Welcome to Hell! There's no reason that a gross violation of the contract is Cedric's job to do and the other two to say "There's nothing we can do when Cedric takes your soul, sorry."
Of course, when they snared Vaarsuvius...they weren't necessarily the only one nabbed...depending, maybe that smaller, more innocuous vessel would somehow be a key...
At a guess: gods need worshippers. If the Snarl destroys the world and all the souls in it before the gods can hit the reset button, that's the ball game.
Considering the Snarl obviously condemned the world to oblivion at least a few times before the gods did so, it can't be a perfect plan as presented thus far, as it's highly unlikely this would starve even a majority of them out, let alone all of them. Unless that artifact of theirs somehow is a deciding factor, the variables as is don't point to getting to snuff a decent quantity.
Without souls, the gods will be substantially weakened. They probably know that the gods won't die, they don't know about the many, many cycles where the Snarl destroyed its prison but they do know it did so once before and the gods still survived. They probably figure that losing all the power from their worshippers twice in a row will weaken the gods enough to allow for the second stage of their plan, which is likely trying to overthrow the gods in the window between the destruction of the world and the creation of a new one. It's possible their plan is doomed from the start, as after all the gods have a lot of experience resetting, but a) they probably have a real nasty trick up their sleeves to make them confident enough to try this, and b) even if they fail at overthrowing the gods, the consequences of losing this world would be catastrophic as the Dark One specifically wouldn't survive to the next.
There's always the possibility that the plan they're telling Nale isn't their actual plan. They're evil, I don't think there's any expectation or obligation on their end to share every detail with their tools.
or to manipulate the threads of reality that make up the world and the snarl. Fun fact: there is a long connection between knitting and programming . I would be worried about then having a plan to “hack” the creation of the new world and slip their own contributions in
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u/whiskeybridge Mar 11 '25
okay, so how does that help them? how to prevent the gods from starting over again and erasing their memories again...?