Chapter Eleven
So Dennagon – well’s let’s clarify, since the book’s naming scheme is incredibly annoying and confusing for people.
Dennagon is the “hero” for this book.
Dradicus is one of the Companions Lyconel assembled.
Drekkenoth is the Evil Bad Guy.
Dennagon takes a moment to mourn for Lyconel. He thinks about how she was constantly thinking and dreaming and answering questions, even though we haven’t seen any evidence of that. Eng then really hones in on the emotion within the scene, letting us experience the pain of a comrade’s passing alongside Dennagon:
In her constant search for certitude, she had deceased without an answer, falling with the same uncertainty that impelled her every contemplation (page 299).
So moving.
Our hero continues inside to the central core.
The intense light harrowed him, flaying his metal plate armor off his body with every step he took, but he did not back down (299).
Light intense enough to flay plate metal would also be enough to cause him lethal harm in a very short time frame. This doesn’t happen.
We skip forward to a room with mechanized parts and circuits and computers covering everything. In the middle of the room, a mobius strip is spinning and emitting silver rays, which is…weird. Dennagon pops in, exhausted and in severe pain, and asks his two remaining questions:
“What is this place? When am I?” (page 301)
Which is…odd, really. Were I in that situation, I’d probably ask “What is the true purpose of the Lexicon?” and “What the fucking fuck is going on?”, but probably not in that order. Asking what place you’re in and when you are seems pretty pointless, especially since someone might respond “A room. And right now.”
The place does seem familiar, though, like he’s visited it in his dreams, and Dennagon has a feeling the Lexicon is somewhere in the chamber. He spots a book hovering in the center of the spinning mobius strip.
“The Lexicon,” he said, mystified. “That must be it.” (page 301)
Really? You don’t say? You’re searching for something called a LEXICON and you see a book hovering in midair inside a spinning glowing mobius strip, and that mystifies you, but you still think that’s gotta be it?
A few bad desert metaphors later, Dennagon heads toward it, but all the frozen technodragons in the room come to life and attack. It plays out like a badly choreographed professional wrestling match:
He kicked it away with a roundhouse jump kick (page 302).
As it struggled in midair, he leapt on top of it, crashing down all his bodyweight (page 302).
He then sized ity by the legs, jerked it down under his legs, and pile drove it back to to the ground (page 302).
Dennagon somersaulted over it, landed on its length neck, and wrested his talons around its skull (page 302).
Dennagon hurtled himself straight into the walls and floor, crushing his enemies with every collision. (page 303)
Eventually he defeats them all and makes his way to the Lexicon and touches it with the power of the Key. It opens, and…
The first page was blank. [snip] Perplexed, he flipped through the entire tome, letting countless papers rip past his vision, not a single one possessing any lettering, symbols, or understandable type of communication. [snip] Finally, he reached the back cover. The tome slammed itself shut, denying the Key of ever opening it again (page 304).
HAHAHAHAAHHAHHAHAAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAH.
That’s…quite possibly the first moment in this entire book that I have genuinely liked, Eng. Well done. It only took you three hundred plus pages.
Dennagon is a little upset and has a pissy fit. He’s finally aware that there is no meaning to life…except to die. Then a portal opens and he sees mutilated dragon figure who is Drekkenoth. Drekkenoth begins to transform with strings of flesh popping out across his body and forming heads. He’s essentially turning himself into a hundred-headed hydra. Which hasn’t been foreshadowed at all in any way. Kind of an evil deus ex machina, come to think of it.
They fight. It’s a bit like a scene out of the Matrix. It’s actually a LOT like a scene out of the Matrix. Dennagon is diving around in the literary equivalent of slow motion while he fights a giant Sentinel-like being:
Busting apart even more brains, he created a splurge of cerebral matter in the air, befogging his enemy’s visions in order to sever even more necks (page 307).
Naturally, now that Drekkenoth has a lot of heads, he’s suddenly incompetent. Dennagon slices off heads like he’s chopping parsley, until he’s triple-headbutted.
Alas, three craniums came for him, triple-headbutting him (page 308).
The blow knocks him backward and he slides across the floor until he crashes into the mobius strip, which breaks.
Divine epochs and millennia of existence broke at the simple collision induced by that mere battle. Linear time bent upon itself, worldlines knotting around their own spacetime like splattered murals of temporal flow. Everything in the fourth dimension collapsed upon itself as light would around a black hole, and the essence of infinity’s ire spread through the entire chamber (page 309).
How the fuck can a period of time be divine? What is the mention of the fourth dimension supposed to mean to us since it’s never been discussed before? How does the concept of infinity have anger?
Drekkenoth looks at his watch and says there’s only one minute until detonation, whatever that is. He grabs Dennagon, exposits that he’s going to kill him, and starts squeezing. Dennagon struggles. His spine breaks. And then…
Dennagon, seeker of the Lexicon and omniscience absolute, perished in the grasp of his enemy (page 309).
FUCKIN’ A!
I have never been so happy in my life. What a brilliant ending. Just kill all of the “good” characters that no readers actually give a shit about, and have this deliciously cold downer ending.
…wait, there’s more text after this.
Dammit.
Drekkenoth tosses the corpse aside and peaces out.
…and there’s still more text.
Dennagon’s body lay still and cold. However, sentience was always separate from the physical forms that bound all creatures, and he could yet dream whilst his soma was deceased (page 310).
Of course. He dreams about a place where space and time are the same where all possible moments in the universe are…the Omnitemporal realm. His “cognizance” flies around bumping into stringy grass which grants him lots of knowledge.
Thoughts showered his mind in a supreme brainstorm that neither washed nor sullied his mind, but rather, enlightened it to a new level of cognition (page 311).
And what, really, is more dramatically satisfying than that? Not a character being forced to actually learn from his mistakes, or discover a cognitive flaw in his thinking through self-reflection, or not even a montage of Dennagon studying at the library over a period of months. Nope, he touches some grass and now he’s smarter!
He plucks a blade of grass and sees it’s covered in circuits, making it (I can only assume) Technograss. He tries to see farther – and we get a Wall of Text where everything becomes clear, by which I mean nothing becomes clear, because this is Eng vomiting words onto the page
The realm was a multiverse of timelines. The veins were worldlines. Linear tracks of three-dimensional hyperplaces that composed chains of destiny upon which the entire World was bound (page 312).
And he knows this…how? Oh, right, he’s smarter than us now.
Dennagon realizes there’s an infinite number of universes, which makes them all meaningless, for some reason. He doesn’t bother to stop and ponder this, or have an existential crisis because he’s realized all of life is meaningless. It doesn’t take him more than another second to decide that since he’s conscious, there’s something to believe in. Wait, what? How does that follow? If you’re conscious, it means you’re aware of your existence, your thoughts, and surroundings. Being aware of your existence doesn’t mean that existence has a Purpose, and it certainly doesn’t give you Something to Believe in.
For a book that tries desperately hard to be important and pretentious and to discuss the big questions in life, it is stunning how few conclusions are drawn. Eng’s characters have fancy, incomprehensible conversations using many-syllable words and the end result is absolutely jack shit. They don’t learn lessons or gain a deeper understanding of the universe. Nothing happens. They argue until they get interrupted and have a fight scene.
Dennagon wants to understand Ultimate Reality. So he stares at the blakes of grass and sees darkened points of light, which sounds…ironic.
Existence was defined only by what a consciousness could observe, and therefore, any fantasy was equally real. This was his last dream, his final fantasy (page 313).
This is idiotic.
I don’t want to dive too far down the philosophic rabbit hole with this, since there’s no end to where you can go when you want to doubt everything, but let’s be clear: there is a world of difference between something observable, such as a lunchbox, and a hallucination from someone on LSD. And there are many, many things we can do, as rational agents, to distinguish between the two. And did Eng really just write the words “final fantasy”?
Nothingness flutters around him, which makes me wonder how he knows it’s there.
With tendrils of ephemeral aether, the random points hooked up to his brain (page 314).
Yeah. He bounces around through the multiverse, and eventually pops into a world where Drekkenoth (Evil Bad Dragon) who is gloating about his recent victory and planning to destroy the humans and take the Gateway of Time, whatever the fuck that is.
Dennagon pops up behind him, and Drekkenoth turns around.
“No,” he refused. “You’ll die!”
Lifting a monumental plasma cannon from his circuit augmented body, he fired his stellar-powered pistons (page 315).
I’m not sure how you fire a piston, but I hope that’s explained in the sequel. Anyway, it doesn’t kill Dennagon:
Instead of detonating, however, his crystals began to meld with the cosmic forces, uniting to fuse glorious wires of pure mana into his eternally diamond nervous system. when it was all cleared, he was not annihilated. He was one with all, and all with one (pages 315-316).
So now he’s one of the Four Musketeers?
Drekkenoth attacks, flailing around with his swords. This would be enough to kill pretty much anything, Eng explains, but Dennagon effortlessly avoids them, tells Drekkenoth that he’s obsolete, and knocks him backward. Dennagon generates a ball of light and hadokens it at Drekkenoth, who screams and starts losing his heads. Dennagon flies toward him at the speed of light [!] and punches him through a wall, killing him. Dennagon grabs the Lexicon and flies out.
On the way, he grabs Lyconel’s technodragon body, and picks up Dradicus as well before he heads out. The Moon explodes and sends debris everywhere, which destroys the Lexicon Tower. They land…somewhere, it’s not really explained. Dennagon skims through the Lexicon, which he can now read, for Reasons, and his eyes start glowing. And…this magically tears away all the circuitry and cyborg stuff from Lyconel and she comes back to life and wakes up.
Dradicus’ heart skipped a beat. His mind wavered at the magnitude of his astonishment. He turned to the light crystal dragon, beholding him as he was in truth. “He is the Lexicon!” he declared. “He is the Lexicon!” (page 321)
No. He’s holding the Lexicon.
Lyconel strokes Dennagon’s face and says she knew they’d meet again. It’s very romantic.
High above the planet, they kissed under the star-speckled night (page 321).
That’s about it. He takes a moment to ponder everything that he’s learned and what the Lexicon has taught him:
“There will always be dreams, and there will always be fantasies. I am in everything and everything is in me.” (page 322)
Wait…that’s it?
“I am the Lexicon.” (page 322)
Oh. Okay. That makes a lot more sense, especially since that’s the end of the book.
I need a drink.
swenson on 16 March 2015, 08:50 said:
And so it ends. As incomprehensibly and full-of-itself as it began.
As a wise man once said (okay, it was Sokka in Avatar: The Abridged Series), I hate this world and everyone in it.
The Smith of Lie on 16 March 2015, 10:24 said:
I tend to think that quoting Shakespeare is pretentious but this one would do well as the review of Lexicon.
Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate… “is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Fireshark on 16 March 2015, 15:18 said:
At least it didn’t say “End of Book 1.”
Castor on 17 March 2015, 00:25 said:
So what exactly was the “Triumvirate” in the title? Did I miss something in the spork? I guess it could refer to Dennagon, Lyconel, and Drekkenoth, maybe? It’s probably something obtuse, or maybe I’m just dumb.
swenson on 17 March 2015, 11:41 said:
Oh my word you guys.
For giggles, I googled the book to see if I could find some reviews of it. To no one’s surprise, the Barnes & Noble reviews are mostly clearly faked—two of them are even an exact copy of one another. But here’s some choice bits from the reviews that you guys might find entertaining:
You know, I really have to agree. I think we all were practically in tears by the end of this book.
Interesting how so many of these reviewers are getting advanced copies. Also, I didn’t actually realize Eng was 20 when he wrote DLT (other sources I found have him claiming he sold DLT when he was 20, contrary to this review), but man, that explains so much.
Well, the first half’s true. I legitimately don’t know what to say, and it truly did have just about everything in it.
spittake GREAT INTELLECTUAL BOOK
But of course that’s why all of us are so down on it, we just didn’t want to spend the “extra brain work” required to understand the “quantum physics ideas”. That’s our problem.
True. But boy howdy he could’ve done with some limits.
I don’t… I don’t know what this means. Like 99% of the technology in the book is totally made up, and… aren’t all novels about the experiences and perceptions of characters? If they were solely about magic or technology, they’d be a textbook, not a novel.
“wild fights”, yeah, incredibly boring ones, maybe.
I don’t remember the dinosaurs or hydras, by the way, except for Drekkenoth looking like a hydra in the final battle.
Oddly enough, this particular review (the duplicated one) then goes on to claim that they didn’t actually like the book, but “Some people who aren¿t as narrow minded as I am would probably really enjoy the creative mixture of science fiction and fantasy elements.” Again, implying that if you don’t like the book, clearly it’s only because you’re narrow-minded and/or stupid.
The Amazon reviews are even better, especially because half the five star reviews are just sarcastic:
Unfortunately there’s a few which are either fakes or… actually by very misguided individuals???
Ooooh, you just gonna sit there and take that, Inheritance Cycle? Buuuurn.
There’s then multiple reviews which refer to how it’s better than Harry Potter, and should be in every sci-fi fan’s collection and going on and on about how the ending blew them away and DID WE MENTION ENG WAS 21!!!
EDIT: I FOUND ANOTHER GREAT ONE!!!
You can't make this stuff up, folks. Oh wait, someone actually did. nvm
The Smith of Lie on 17 March 2015, 11:53 said:
Who the hell considers himself narro minded? Seriously. A person who’d be condescending towards it because it is fantasy (not that D:LT does not deserve sconr) would not consider themselves limited. They’d just condescend on it.
Is… Is that a threat? Does he want world governments to pay him billion dollars so he does not do this?
Well, and here I though I have good imagination. I can’t imagine film of the book. Unless a copious amounts of LSD are given out before every screening.
Asahel on 17 March 2015, 14:06 said:
I can imagine watching a movie on this book, too. Still, I think I’d prefer to watch one on a screen…
Pie on 18 March 2015, 03:35 said:
Those reviews… I don’t even know what to say.
Who was that anyway? I really can’t remember.
Also, that ending – I feel cheated! To be honest, this is the first time I was happy about main character deaths but of course they had to come back to life. Why?
):
Smith of Lie, can we have a ficlet please? Where everyone’s permanently dead and Drekkenoth wins?
The Smith of Lie on 18 March 2015, 06:49 said:
I never did requests before. Mostly cause no one was so desperate and masochistic to want to read anything I’d create. But seeing the quality of the original I can see how my stuff may seem good in comparison.
I dare not try and copy Eng’s style though. I am not brain damaged enough. Still I think I can knock out a little spiteful ficlet.
Dennagon walked towards the floating Moebius strip. He reached for the book inside and opened it. There was only one thing written inside. A single number. 42. “Disappointing, ain’t it?” He turned quickly just to see Drekkenoth standing behind him. “What is it supposed to mean?” Dennagon asked. Technodragon smiled. “That the author is talentless hack, who can’t make a passing attempt at wit and just alludes to better works to mask it.” Dennagon waved the book angrily. “It was supposed to contain all the knowledge in the universe!” “Well, that’d be a big book then. Consider that storing all the information about the universe would require more space than that universe contains. Luckily we have authorial bullshit on our side.” Drekkenoth gestured towards the Moebius strip still floating behind Dennagon. “That thing over there is a self contained alternative universe that contains Laplace’s Demon – like set of knowledge about our universe.”
Dennagon considered implications of what he just heard. It meant that the book was not the Lexicon. It was just someone’s sick idea of a joke. The real Lexicon was the silvery, shining strip. And it was just in his hand’s reach. He moved to touch it. “NO!” Drekkenoth shouted and jumped at Dennagon. He rebuffed technodragon’s attack and threw him at the nearest wall with such force, that he flew straight through it. Dennagon knew, that he’d be back, but it bought him enough time to touch the Lexicon. His hand grasped the universe and it broke into streak of particles that hit Dennagon in the chest.
He felt the shards of Lexicon embedding themselves inside him, dissolving inside his body, being absorbed and becoming parts of him. He was becoming the Lexicon. “The being with all that knowledge will virtually become a god.” Drekkenoth was back. Dennagon turned towards him and smiled. “Then you have just angered a god!”
Knowledge started flooding Dennagon’s mind. It started with big, general things. Shape of the planets. Creatures living on them. Geology. Hydrology. The very shape of universe, the dance of galaxies. In each second he learned more than in hundred lifetimes. He knew the biology of innumerable species. He saw the laws of physics and the theorems of math. And than it reached the micro scale. In the manner of mere moments he knew the position of all atoms in the universe. And than of electrons. And he knew more and more, positions of all particles, down to neutrinos and Higgs’ bosons. And then, when he knew the positions of all particles in whole of the universe, he learned of their momentum. His mind broke.
Drekkenoth watched as the life drained from Dennagon’s eyes, replaced by a thousand yard stare. Foaming from his mouth the dragon fell on his knees in catatonia. “As a wise man once said, ‘the god is dead’.” Drekkenoth walked to him and patted the unconscious Dennagon’s head. “Thank you. I’d never be able to destroy the Lexicon without you.” Lyconel, already fixed by her nanite augmentations, landed behind him and knelt. “Is it done my Lord?” Drekkenoth nodded. “You did well. He never suspected that you’ve been leading him here for me.” He walked towards the exit humming quietly. Straining her ears Lyconel could hear few words of the song, he sung quietly under his breath. “Contaminating the countryside… Contaminating all the dragons…”
Now that he destroyed the Lexicon he could retire. But on the other hand he heard this guy called Appolyon was looking for trustworthy allies. Working with him could be fun…
swenson on 18 March 2015, 10:10 said:
I googled him because he got mentioned on the DLT TV Tropes page. He was apparently one of the group that Lyconel and Dennagon was part of, who betrayed them randomly at one point.
mineralica on 22 March 2015, 17:07 said:
I can imagine the movie if it were heavy/power metal musical: a chain of disconnected scenes and PATHOS. Otherwise… hell, I still didn’t get what this book was trying to achieve.