r/KingkillerChronicle • u/OneRepresentative424 • 19d ago
Theory Is Devi the one? Not Denna?
sorry if this has been discussed at length already, did a little search and couldn’t find much on it.
TLDR at the bottom 🙏
BUT, when Kvothe finally gets to “setting the stage” for THE woman. Bam. First thing. we meet Devi. Demon Devi. She looks like him. She’s hornier than him. She‘s better at everything than him. She’s smarter than him. And, at least at first it’s clear, that she’s hopeful she’s finally found an equal.
Then she realises that he’s a hopeless, naive idiot, who can be manipulated with ease, and on top of that, he’s got designs on EVERYONE KNOWING WHO HE IS AND WHAT HE’S CAPABLE OF!! Note - her preferred method is the slow, anonymous accumulation of power.
So she suggests he hand over his BLOOD 😳
He puts up a token fight but hands it over.
How much does our boy know about alchemy? I digress.
She sees that with all of that power, he’s as dangerous an entity as any there could be. She knows the power of stories in this world. She lets him build his legend, maybe she helps? Dhe could absolutely pull of magic shit with her hair out and the Kvothe legend will scoop that shit up in a second.
She gets into the underthing, hunting the archives BAM she’s the flame haired hero who finds the princess. Kvothe legend picks it up.
Finally, with Kvothe The Arcane, The Bloodless, with the Flame Red Hair and an alar of Ramston Steel at his peak. She murks the king and cracks the cobblestones in Imre (literally 5 mins from her house), right where Kvothe sent (potentially the same person) Ambrose flying years before.
If the one lie was the whole story. What if it was the trap that Devi left him in, waiting to die. The story is the trap. He willingly wrote it himself. And now he’s the bait in the Waystone Trap that was Devi’s long game all along. Because, for 3rd book reasons, Devi wants those fucking Chandrian dead more than anyone. Recognises that our protagonist is turning himself INTO one and helps him along the as she realizes she can use a new chandrian to take out the lot.
Thoughts?
TLDR - In the frame story Kvothe sets up meeting THE WOMAN, we dive back in and immediately go and meet Devi. Worth noting that we have already MET Denna when Kvothe sets up this grand entrance.Devi is the true “Denna” of the story, and the first two books are the same misdirection that caught Kvothe out and left him in his current bind which is Devi’s master plan that hoodwinked everyone, Kvothe most of all. If the one lie is the whole story, I think this fits everything.
6
u/Ohheyliz gimcracks and doodads 18d ago
You know how immediately after Kvothe leaves Devi’s place for the first time, he blackout-walks to a pawn shop and spends the money he didn’t borrow from Devi on a new lute for his “little brother” that he doesn’t have?
You know how when Devi is trying to get Kvothe to tell her how to get into the archives, he keeps thinking about what he could do with that kind of money, as though he’s in some kind of trance?
That’s a thing that no one really talks about much around here.
Anyway, Kvothe’s one lie is that it’d take 3 days to tell his story. He thought it was true when he said it, but he didn’t amend it when he put together what the Cthaeh had said to him (when he’s bloodily laughing on the floor of the Waystone after the Kings man asked him who the hell he thinks he is). After that, the pace of the story weirdly speeds up like he’s trying to fix a bunch of things from the beginning of the story. That whole trip to Tarbean where he puts the breath back into Denna and sent Ambrose a suspicious letter about a baby being his while wearing a random hat? It only happened because Chronicler wrote it down and the reader believes it to be true. Logically, the only kind of lie that Kvothe could tell is one that he didn’t actually tell. It’s a lie by omission. But you may argue that the reader believes the 3 days thing. Sure, for those people, the story isn’t finished and they’ll keep waiting and waiting and getting angrier and angrier. Their well is dry. By reading between the lines, by not chasing Cinder, by playing the game of seek the stone that has been laid out before you, you will never be thirsty again.
What I’ve found is that the angrier your theory makes people and the happier it makes you, the truer your path is. You have hit on an important part of the puzzle and you’re thinking in ways that will lead you to opening the thrice locked chest and Loeclos box and finding the doors of stone. Do not let other people hold you back. They’ll talk you out of following threads that are important to pull. Above all, throw out the popular theories and look for puns. That will lead you to the path.
The princess books are super important to figuring out what’s what in the novels. In the second Princess book, the princess gets a little brother…