The Kwaan Plate
also known as the plate-text, the steel plate of Kwaan
A roughly five-foot-square steel plate set into the back wall of a small rough-cut chamber beneath the Conventical of Seran, its face densely etched in old Terris script that the steel has kept undamaged for centuries. The opening lines name the writer as Kwaan, "philosopher, scholar, traitor," and the inscription is a confession that he was the one who first identified Alendi as the Hero of Ages — and the one who later betrayed him to keep him from completing his quest. The chapters of the book are headed by excerpts from it. MB1:WoA:Ch 12
Known facts
- tindwyl-spots-inconsistencyTindwyl reading the plate alongside Sazed catches a hole at the centre of Kwaan's argument: Kwaan feared the Deepness enough to record his terror in steel, but also feared Alendi taking the Well's power enough to send the volatile young Rashek to kill him — and the record gives no honest reason for the second fear to outweigh the first. She reads it as a sign that something dramatic must have happened that the plate does not say.MB1:WoA:Ch 41
- warning-sentence-stolen-from-all-copiesSomeone with access to Sazed's rooms — and to the locked trunk holding the original — tears the same single sentence out of every transcription of the rubbing and out of the rubbing itself, in identical tears across pages that could not have been stacked together. The missing line is Kwaan's warning that Alendi must not be allowed to take the Well's power for himself. Sazed still has the line perfectly intact in his coppermind.MB1:WoA:Ch 45
- serves-as-translation-keySazed understands that the plate is functioning less as a journal than as a translation key — Kwaan explicitly equates the Terris Hero of Ages with Khlennium's Rabzeen and with the Anamnesor. Without that cross-reference the same prophecies, scattered through Keeper biographies under other names, were unrecognisable as the same figure.MB1:WoA:Ch 45
- original-final-line-is-about-releasing-somethingThe line every copy of Sazed's rubbing carried — that Alendi cannot take the Well's power for himself — is not the line actually cut into the plate. The original instead forbids reaching the Well at all, because the thing held prisoner inside it must not be set loose. The prophecies were rewritten over centuries to invert the religion's moral imperative: from do not release it to do not keep it.MB1:WoA:Epilogue
Events
- MB1:WoA:Ch 12 Set into the rear wall of a small rough-cut chamber beneath the spike-forging room; Sazed reads its opening lines and takes a charcoal rubbing.
Backreferences
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 57
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 62
- factKwaan
- factThe Worldbringers
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 15
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 30
- factHarmony
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 37
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 41
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 45
- factThe Kwaan Plate
- factThe Kwaan Plate
- factThe Rabzeen
- factThe Anamnesor
- factHarmony
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 57
- summaryMB1:WoA:Epilogue
- factKwaan
- factThe Kwaan Plate
- factHarmony