Convergence as Narrative Device

Introduction

"Convergence" is, within the Malazan Book of the Fallen, both a cosmological phenomenon and a narrative technique — and the crucial feature of its treatment in the series is that these two senses are deliberately collapsed into one. In the fictional world, convergence is a physical law: power attracts power, and when sufficient concentrations of magical, divine, or historical force move toward a single point, the result is a climactic event that rewrites the surrounding reality. In the narrative world, convergence is the structural device that every work of storytelling uses to organise its plot: disparate threads pulled toward a single moment of culmination. What makes Erikson's treatment distinctive is that he invents an in-world vocabulary for the narrative technique itself, allowing his characters to notice — and eventually to resent — the pattern being imposed on them.

This essay examines convergence through five principal dimensions: its foundational articulation as "power draws power" in Gardens of the Moon; its progressive exposure as a meta-fictional device that characters themselves begin to comment on; Erikson's own stated account of the technique and the challenge of sustaining it across ten volumes; the two paradigmatic convergence scenes of the late series (the Darujhistan climax of Toll the Hounds and Fiddler's Deck reading in Dust of Dreams); and the final resolution of convergence into the Mobius-strip meta-structure through which Erikson frames the whole series as a self-addressing narrative.

"Power Draws Power": The Foundational Formula

The phrase that recurs across the series is established in the first novel. In Gardens of the Moon, the Elder god K'rul warns Kruppe of approaching dangers with the formulation that will become one of the series' most-repeated sentences:

"Allies might come from surprising quarters. I will tell you this: two now approach the city, one is a T'lan Imass, the other a bane to magic... Power attracts power, Kruppe. Leave them to the consequences of their actions." (GotM)

Within the same novel, the sorceress Tattersail explains the principle in more analytical terms as she recognises its consequences for Darujhistan:

"Not foolish. Insane. Do you realize what could be unleashed here? Some believe the Hounds are more ancient than the Shadow Realm itself. But it's not just them — power draws power. If one Ascendant parts the fabric here and now, others will come, smelling blood. Come the dawn every mortal in this city could be dead." (GotM)

And Quick Ben, the Bridgeburners' high mage, shows how the principle can be weaponised deliberately:

"So we do it this way because it's the only way left to us. Hairlock's insanity has become a liability, but we can use him still, one last time. Power draws power, and with luck Hairlock's demise will do just that. The more Ascendants we can lure into the fray the better." (GotM)

The three passages together establish the structure of convergence as the series will deploy it. K'rul articulates it as a cosmic law; Tattersail recognises it as a threat; Quick Ben treats it as a tool. Convergence is, simultaneously, something that happens to characters and something they can engineer. It operates in the fictional world with the same dual status it possesses at the level of narrative craft — an author's structural technique is also, from the inside, something the characters can see, name, and manipulate.

The formula persists across the whole series. In The Crippled God, nine volumes later, the same sentence recurs: "the footfall of gods upon the land shall summon like drums of war. Power draws power — too soon, too far away" (TCG). The vocabulary is remarkably stable precisely because it is doing rhetorical work that does not diminish with repetition: each invocation of "power draws power" reminds the reader that the machinery they are watching is itself the subject of the story. The plot device is not hidden behind the events; it is named by them.

Convergence Named as a Curse

By the middle of the series, the language of convergence has been internalised by enough characters that it begins to function as a shared term of art — and, tellingly, as a term of complaint. In Memories of Ice, Silverfox gives the principle its darkest formulation:

"We are all drawing close. You to your besieged city, and I to the destiny to which I was born. Convergence, the plague of this world." (MoI)

The framing — convergence as plague — reverses the affective charge the term previously carried. What began as a neutral description of how magical forces interact has become, in Silverfox's mouth, a diagnosis of the world's malady. To be caught in a convergence is not to be the subject of an adventure but to be infected by a pattern beyond personal control.

The complaint reaches its sharpest expression in Dust of Dreams, where Queen Abrastal refuses the cosmological framing outright:

"'You say that such forces are fated to meet, Spax. But... this is not the same.'

'How do you mean, Highness?'

'Is chance the weapon of fate? One might say so, I imagine, but what is drawing close before us, Spax, is something crueller. Random, unpredictable. Stupid, in fact. It is the curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.'" (DoD)

Abrastal's rejection of convergence as an explanatory principle is the series' most explicit meta-fictional protest. She is, in effect, a character arguing against the author's own structural commitments — insisting that what the book is calling convergence is actually mere bad luck, and that the dignity of the word obscures the stupidity of the reality. Elsewhere in the same novel, Abrastal reflects:

"What fascinated and indeed haunted her was that such a convergence of chance events could so perfectly conspire to take a man's life. From this one example, Abrastal quickly comprehended that such patterns existed everywhere, and could be assembled for virtually every accidental death." (DoD)

The remark captures the essential paradox of convergence. Seen from inside, every convergence looks like chance. Seen from outside — with the narrative framework available — the same sequence looks like fate. The difference between the two interpretations is not evidential but perspectival. Abrastal is arguing that the word "convergence" is a retrospective rationalisation of randomness. The novel, which uses the word constantly, is either disagreeing with her or quietly conceding that she may be right.

Kallor — the series' darkest and most long-lived meta-commentator — takes a third position in Toll the Hounds, refusing both the heroic and the random interpretations in favour of a cosmic structural realism:

"Too often scholars and historians saw the principle of convergence with narrow, truncated focus. In terms of ascendants and gods and great powers. But Kallor understood that the events they described and pored over after the fact were but concentrated expressions of something far vaster. Entire ages converged, in chaos and tumult, in the anarchy of Nature itself. And more often than not, very few comprehended the disaster erupting all around them. No, they simply went on day after day with their pathetic tasks, eyes to the ground, pretending that everything was just fine. Nature wasn't interested in clutching their collars and giving them a rattling shake, forcing their eyes open. No, Nature just wiped them off the board." (TtH)

Kallor's expansion of convergence to include entire ages, rather than discrete events, turns the device into a theory of history. In his formulation, what readers perceive as distinct convergences (the Chaining of the Crippled God, the fall of Darujhistan, the breaking of Dragnipur) are merely the visible tips of a much larger structural movement — the convergence of geological and historical forces whose scale exceeds any individual's perception. This is convergence as climate change rather than as weather.

Erikson's Account: The Device Made Literal

Erikson has provided, in his DLC Bookclub interview for Dust of Dreams, what is perhaps the single most important statement of how convergence works at the level of craft:

"And that's just the point was — we have to think in terms of metafictional aspects to it. The convergence, which became articulated as something that the characters within that world, at least some of them, were aware of — 'power draws power' and so on — in a meta sense that is an unavoidable plot device for pretty much any story you can think of. Anything, any film you've watched, everything is actually converging, and that's the climax of the story. So in a structural sense, convergence is built into all of our storytelling. It's just there. And so within this thing here, Cam and I are creating this secondary world where that is actually acknowledged. It's actually recognised as part of that worldbuilding. And of course we use gods and forces to metaphorically represent the convergence of certain events leading to climactic scenes. So it's a meta element that is then made literal in the Malazan world. But at a certain point, if you were to live in a world like that, you would end up getting pretty pissed off — because you would feel as if some kind of narrative ploy or plot is being imposed on your life." (DLC Dust of Dreams transcript)

Several things are worth marking in this passage. First, Erikson explicitly identifies convergence as "an unavoidable plot device" — something every story must use, whether or not it names the use. Second, he identifies the naming of the device as the distinctive Malazan move: the secondary world has not merely inherited the structural principle but acknowledged it as such, built into its cosmology. Third, he recognises the resulting paradox — that characters living within such a world would, rationally, begin to resent it, because they would feel "a narrative ploy" imposed on their lives. The Abrastal and Kallor passages quoted above are Erikson honouring this paradox: giving his characters the right to notice and complain about the pattern into which he has placed them.

Same interview, Erikson on the challenge of sustaining surprise when convergence has become expected:

"That was the challenge I wanted to tackle: to surprise the reader repeatedly. So the best way of doing it is to set up the expectations so that the reader feels that they are able to predict where it's going, and then to pull the rug out from under them as best I can." (DLC Reaper's Gale transcript)

And on the Dust of Dreams ending — the anti-convergence par excellence:

"It's basically saying there's a randomness to our existence. It is the opposite of convergence. It is just bad luck, basically... Maybe we're going to come in and swoop in and save the day, and it just — nothing works. And you have this horrible Empire Strikes Back ending." (DLC Dust of Dreams transcript)

The invocation of The Empire Strikes Back is telling. That film is famous for its refusal to provide closure — for ending at the moment of maximum defeat, with the heroes scattered, the rescue incomplete, the villain victorious. Erikson points to it as a model for the kind of ending Dust of Dreams required: a deliberate inversion of the convergence the reader has been trained to expect. By Dust of Dreams, the reader knows that the final hundred pages of a Malazan novel are supposed to be a convergence. Erikson's response is to set up the convergence and then refuse it. The riders do not arrive in time. The saving forces do not save. The convergence that the structure demands is replaced by a brutal contingency — bad luck, wrong place, wrong time. The technique's power depends entirely on the reader's trained expectations being first built up and then betrayed.

The craft problem this creates is acute. A reader who has learned to expect convergences will not be surprised by their arrival; a reader who has learned to expect them to be subverted will not be surprised by their subversion. Erikson's solution is to oscillate unpredictably — to deliver conventional convergences (Toll the Hounds, The Crippled God) alongside anti-convergences (Dust of Dreams), so that neither pattern becomes reliably predictive. The reader is kept permanently off-balance by the structural uncertainty about which technique is being deployed at any given moment.

The Toll the Hounds Convergence: Rake, Dragnipur, and the Darujhistan Climax

Toll the Hounds contains the series' most elaborately constructed conventional convergence. The Tiste Andii High Priestess registers its approach in the idiom of weather:

"The sky was locked in convulsions, a convergence of inimical elements." (TtH)

Baruk, simultaneously, senses multiple convergences layered atop one another:

"Was she aware of the other convergences fast closing on Darujhistan? ... The recollection left a sour taste in Baruk's mouth." (TtH)

The plural is significant. Toll the Hounds does not stage a single convergence but a stack of them, each operating at a different scale: the personal (Harllo's rescue), the urban (the city's Festival of the Moon), the cosmic (Rake's final gambit with Dragnipur), and the metaphysical (Hood's arrival). These events proceed simultaneously and reinforce one another, creating a density of narrative pressure that the novel's final third can barely contain.

The central movement is Anomander Rake's deliberate walk through Darujhistan carrying Dragnipur — the cursed sword whose function is to draw the souls of the slain into an eternal labour that holds Chaos at bay. The physical description renders the convergence as bodily load:

"The Son of Darkness, Dragnipur in one hand, bowed and bent like an old man. The sword's point grated and then caught in the join between four cobbles. And Anomander Rake began to lean on it, every muscle straining as his legs slowly gave way — no, he could not stand beneath this weight. And so he sank down, the sword before him, both hands on the cross-hilt's wings, head bowed against Dragnipur." (TtH)

Rake does not merely approach the convergence; he carries it. The sword's weight is the weight of the accumulated souls within it, and Rake's inability to stand beneath that weight is the physical expression of the cosmic calculation he has made. He is walking toward a sacrifice that requires not only his own death but the release of every soul Dragnipur has ever trapped. The convergence has a cargo, and Rake is the porter.

The climactic exchange with Dassem Ultor — rendered in prose of unusual syntactic compression — resolves the tension:

"Rake wide-legged, angling the pommel high before his face with Dragnipur's point downward... and Dassem, his free hand joining the other upon his sword's grip, throwing his entire weight into a crossways slash — the warrior bodily lifting as if about to take to the air and close upon Rake with an embrace, and his swing met the edge of Dragnipur at a full right angle — a single moment shaping a perfect cruciform fashioned by the two weapons' colliding, and then the power of Dassem's blow slammed Dragnipur back — driving its inside edge into Anomander Rake's forehead, and then down through his face. His gauntleted hands sprang away from the handle, yet Dragnipur remained jammed, seeming to erupt from his head, as he toppled backward." (TtH)

The image of the "perfect cruciform" formed by the two weapons at the moment of collision is Erikson's most visually exact rendering of convergence as such: two trajectories, each inevitable given its premises, meeting at a precise geometrical point. The cross itself is the structural principle of the scene — the point at which independent vectors become a single event. The breaking of Dragnipur that follows — "Dragnipur, sword of the father and slayer of the same. Sword of Chains, Gate of Darkness, wheeled burden of life and life ever flees dissolution..." (TtH) — is the consequence of this convergence: the release of everything the sword contained, the reconfiguration of the cosmology downstream of the event.

Erikson has acknowledged that Rake's death was determined from the beginning of the project:

"It was the circumstances of the campaign that led Traveler to face off with Rake... there wasn't a moment where he decided like 'oh, now Anomander Rake dies' — it was like, from Moment One Anomander is going to die." (Toll the Hounds Conversation with Erikson transcript)

This is the characteristic Erikson method: the convergence is not improvised at the moment of writing but has been structurally required from the series' inception. Rake's death is not a plot twist; it is a plot premise, embedded in the architecture from the start and steadily approached across eight volumes.

Fiddler's Deck Reading: Convergence as Ritual Physics

One of the series' most remarkable convergence scenes occurs not in Toll the Hounds but in Dust of Dreams, when the sapper Fiddler performs a Deck of Dragons reading in Letheras that turns spontaneously violent. Cards — ordinarily decorative objects used to read fate — begin flying through the air and embedding themselves in the bodies of those in the room, each person receiving the card that represents their cosmic position:

"At each impact — as Brys stared in horror — the victim was lifted off the floor, chair tumbling away, and slammed against the wall behind them no matter the distance. The collisions cracked bones... Fiddler standing as if in the heart of a maelstrom, solid as a deep-rooted tree. The first struck was the girl, Sinn. 'Virgin of Death.' As the card smacked into her chest it heaved her, limbs flailing, up to a section of wall just beneath the ceiling... 'Mason of Death.' Hedge bleated and made the mistake of turning round. The card struck his back and hammered him face first into the wall... Fiddler now faced the Adjunct. 'You knew, didn't you?' Staring, pale as snow, she said nothing. 'For you, Tavore Paran... nothing.' She flinched." (DoD)

The scene literalises what convergence does to people. The Deck of Dragons — a divination system whose cards name the major cosmic offices and forces — is ordinarily used interpretively: the reader lays out the cards, observes their patterns, and draws inferences about the positions of the actors in the world. Fiddler's reading inverts the procedure. Instead of cards being consulted about people, people are assigned to cards, and the assignment is physically enforced. The violence of the impacts is the violence of identification itself: to discover one's true position in the cosmic structure is to be slammed into that position against one's will.

The aftermath is registered in appropriately apocalyptic terms:

"'A whole building went crashing down!' ... 'People died, is what I'm telling you, Bottle. And if that's not bad enough, there were plenty of witnesses claiming to see two dragons rise out of the rubble.'" (DoD)

The collapse of the building and the apparition of dragons are not ornamental details. They are the physical side-effects of a sufficient concentration of narrative force made literal. Fiddler has not merely read the cards; he has performed a localised convergence, and the collateral damage is what convergence always looks like from the outside — structures collapsing, unexplained dragons rising, the ordinary fabric of reality failing to contain the event.

The Adjunct's non-card — "For you, Tavore Paran... nothing" — is the most significant element of the scene. Every other character receives an assignment; Tavore receives an absence. The convergence machinery that has placed everyone else cannot locate her. This is either the ultimate disempowerment (she has no cosmic role) or the ultimate elevation (her role exceeds the Deck's capacity to name it). The series will eventually resolve the ambiguity in favour of the latter reading: Tavore is the unwitnessed hero, the one whose sacrifice cannot be categorised because it refuses to request the categorisation. But at the moment of the reading, the point is the structural one — that convergence has limits, that some agents exceed the framework within which convergence operates, and that Tavore's emptiness in the Deck is the series' signal that its own machinery will not be sufficient to render her arc.

Shadowthrone and Cotillion: Planning for Convergence

If convergence is the structural principle of the series, the characters best adapted to it are Shadowthrone and Cotillion — the former Emperor Kellanved and his First Sword Dancer, now the god of Shadow and the patron of assassins. The two operate throughout the series as convergence-managers, positioning pieces across the board so that no matter how events unfold, they retain the ability to act. As Philip Chase observes in his spoiler discussion of The Bonehunters:

"They have redundancy after redundancy after redundancy. Never have just Plan A — you have plans A all the way through to Z, and it means no matter what circumstances come up you have a tool in place to enact your will." (Spoiler Chat: The Bonehunters transcript)

Erikson confirms this reading in his Critical Conversations episode on chapter 23 of the same novel, framing the style as extemporisation from a prepared board:

"It's not that Shadowthrone goes 'I have a plan' — it's Shadowthrone goes 'I can extemporise a plan based on the fact that I have thirty different playing pieces on the board at any one time, and I can now do what I want.'" (Critical Conversations 07 transcript)

This is a sophisticated model of plot agency. Conventional fantasy plotting tends to treat villain and hero plans as deterministic — the plan is conceived, executed, succeeds or fails. Shadowthrone's approach is statistical. He does not commit to any single outcome; he arranges the board so that many outcomes favour him, and then allows contingency to determine which of those outcomes actually obtains. This is convergence as probability distribution rather than as prophecy. The gods who best understand the cosmic principle are those who refuse to rely on it — who hedge their bets, place redundant pieces, and treat the inevitability of convergence as a reason to prepare for its unpredictability rather than as a reason to predict its outcome.

When Shadowthrone openly uses the word "convergence" to describe his cooperation with Menandore in Reaper's Gale, the term acquires a legalistic flavour:

"'Convenient convergence of desires, Menandore. Ask Hood about such things, especially now.'... 'I retract all notions of "help". We are mutually assisting one another, as fits said convergence; and once finished with the task at hand, no other obligations exist between us.'" (RG)

The phrase "convenient convergence of desires" is characteristic Shadowthrone — the acknowledgement that what the cosmos calls "convergence" is often, from the inside, just the momentary alignment of interests between agents who will diverge again once the present task is complete. This is convergence reduced to its most cynical register: not destiny, not cosmic law, but a temporary coalition of the willing.

The Meta-Fictional Resolution: Mobius Strips and Crises of Faith

The series' most comprehensive statement on what convergence is for comes in Erikson's DLC Bookclub interview on The Crippled God, where he articulates the meta-fictional structure that governs the whole project. The metaphor he uses is the Möbius strip:

"Imagine taking a strip of paper. On one end, writing 'Crippled God.' And then flipping the paper, and on this end writing 'Steven Erikson, Malazan Book of the Fallen.' Now twist the paper, bring the ends together and tape it. Now take a pen and, right where the Crippled God is written, start drawing a line and don't let the pen leave the paper. And you will follow all the way along and you'll come all the way to Steven Erikson... Basically it's a Mobius loop." (DLC Crippled God transcript)

The series is, in this account, not a linear narrative but a closed topological structure in which the fictional character at one end (the Crippled God) and the author at the other end (Erikson himself) are connected by a continuous surface. The plot device of convergence, understood at the level of craft, is the mechanism by which this connection is made — the pattern of meaning-making that collapses the distance between the fictional world and the authorial act. When characters inside the story notice convergence, they are (structurally) approaching the author who has placed them there. When the reader notices convergence as a pattern, the reader is (structurally) approaching the same author from the other side. The Mobius strip is the figure for a narrative that refuses the usual distinction between inside and outside — that uses its own cosmology as a vehicle for a metafictional engagement with storytelling itself.

Erikson extends the same topological principle to Toll the Hounds, which he calls "a Möbius loop within the Mobius loop of the entire series," with Kruppe functioning as a local version of the Crippled God's overall role:

"Kruppe is a cipher for the series because that is a Mobius loop within the Mobius loop of the entire series... It's Kruppe doing — playing the same role as the Crippled God plays in the full series, but he's doing it for one novel. And of course even there, there are things that he describes that he could not possibly know within the diegetic world, right? But he does." (DLC Crippled God transcript)

Kruppe's impossible knowledge — his ability to narrate events he could not have witnessed, to speak to readers across the text's diegetic boundary — is not a bug but the local signature of the Mobius structure. His strangeness is the strangeness of a character whose function is to mark the surface on which the fictional and authorial worlds meet.

Erikson also frames the entire project as a sustained crisis of faith — both the characters' and the reader's:

"It is sort of asking of the reader to have faith to continue in this process. But also it's an acknowledgement of me holding on to my faith that the reader will do so... In many ways the entire series is an examination of the crisis of faith." (DLC Dust of Dreams transcript)

And as he became more confident with the meta-presence, the authorial voice migrated closer to the surface:

"As the series progressed and I became more comfortable with my meta presence within the narrative, I was being dragged closer and closer to the surface of the story." (DLC Crippled God transcript)

This is the trajectory of convergence as a device across the ten volumes. In Gardens of the Moon, the word "convergence" is a character's term for a cosmological phenomenon. By Dust of Dreams, it has become the object of explicit meta-fictional protest (Abrastal's complaint). By The Crippled God, it has been absorbed into a topological model of the entire series as a self-aware structure in which the fictional world and the authorial act are sides of a single surface. What began as a plot device has become a theory of what plot devices are.

The Paran Siblings: The Smallest Convergence

Erikson has identified what may be the most affecting convergence in the entire series — and it is also the smallest. In the same Crippled God interview, the interviewer points out that the reunion of Ganoes and Tavore Paran, late in the final volume, is itself a convergence: the gathering of two siblings in the presence of the ghost of their lost sister Felisin. Erikson's response is one of genuine surprise at his own work:

"I never thought about that as the smallest convergence of the book — where these huge factions are getting together, the biggest possible players, the biggest sort of power levels that we see across all the different magics in the books — that is the smallest scale convergence of just the Paran family being together again. And the explosiveness of those emotions, and Tavore finally having somebody she can be open with. Finally having somebody who can carry her for a moment, just emotionally in that beat, while they're thinking of their sister, they're mourning the absence of what should have been the third prong of this. I haven't thought about that as another convergence, but that I think is such a beautiful little — of course it is." (DLC Crippled God transcript)

And on why Tavore's first line to her brother could only be about the missing sister:

"There's no other line that Tavore could have said as the first line to her brother. No other line is possible. It's about the one who's missing. And it's about the burden that she has carried not knowing." (DLC Crippled God transcript)

The scene performs, at intimate scale, everything the series' major convergences perform at cosmic scale. Disparate trajectories are drawn together by forces beyond the agents' control. A moment of contact releases accumulated pressure. Something is completed, and something else — the absent third — is marked as irrecoverable. The largest convergences in the series (Rake's death, Fiddler's reading, the Bonehunters' arrival at the shore where the Crippled God is freed) have the same structure as this small one: gathered vectors, a moment of contact, a release that is also a loss. That the most elaborate cosmological machinery in the series reduces, at last, to a conversation between two siblings about the sister they could not save is the point. Convergence is not finally about power. It is about the patterns within which love discovers what it could not protect.

Conclusion

Convergence in the Malazan Book of the Fallen operates as the series' central structural technique, its most visible meta-fictional signature, and its deepest theory of narrative. By making explicit what other fictions leave implicit — by inventing a vocabulary within the world for the device that organises the world's plot — Erikson achieves a double effect. The reader is given a cosmological explanation for why the plot converges; the characters are given the right to notice, resent, and argue with the pattern into which they have been placed. The resulting texture is distinctive: a fantasy series that uses its genre's conventional structural machinery while simultaneously commenting on that machinery from inside itself. Convergence, in Erikson's hands, is not merely how the plot resolves but what the series is about — the recognition that every story pulls its threads toward a climactic moment, and that the honest way to write such stories is to say so.

The final vision is the Mobius strip: a series whose outside and inside are one surface, whose character-level convergences map onto the authorial act of convergence itself, and whose climactic moments are simultaneously events in the fictional world and acts of meta-fictional self-address. The Paran siblings' reunion, in which the cosmological machinery of ten volumes collapses into two people talking about a third who cannot be present, is the figure for the whole enterprise. The biggest convergence is also the smallest. The plot device is also the theory of the plot device. The fiction is also a conversation about fiction — and the convergence is, in the end, the moment when the author, the characters, and the reader all arrive at the same point on the same surface, having come from what seemed like opposite directions.

Sources

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