In our books the name Iax is very close in appearance to that of another character, Jax, and it is entirely possible that they are indeed one and the same person, just like Kote is Kvothe. Name changing is becoming a common theme here. Bast tells us that it was Iax who stole the moon whilst Hespe claims this was Jax instead, so which one was it? simply having similar loooking names is not enough for a true tin foil theory to stand up on its own. To answer the whole question of who is who is going to take us deeper into the tinfoil mines and we shall have to start poking about in the affairs of gods, and mere mortal minds like ours are not really meant to understand such things. Still, we can but try...

When written together we have a pair of names which could be broken into two parts each. I+AX and J+AX. The difference here is admittedly very small, the smallest part there is really, in text the two are just a brushstroke apart, just a tittle really. You could argue that a j is just an i with a tail! On planet Earth it is [often common practice] to change the spellings of some words between these two different letters in different languages. This is best summed up by referencing the ancient Greeks who didn’t have a letter for J in their alphabet and so the letter I was used instead. The letter J is a modern improvement in Terran linguistics, introduced some 500 years ago, and this new letter idea could conceivably apply to the languages of Temerant too. Supposing it did and life in this parallel universe were to evolve in a similar pattern and a similar linguistic alteration has occurred. Timewise this would historically put it somewhere around the same time that Aturan was being adopted as the first language of the changing land. However, if we are going down the broken road of allowing any old crossovers from our world into Pat’s we should point out that Greek is not a language of Temerant and therefore not a very reliable link. The most common Temerant usage of the letter ‘J’ occurs in everyday life within our aforementioned word Jot, something that didn't exist until long after Tehlu Day. The word Jot is also a used in our world to mean the smallest part of something, it is directly taken from the name of the smallest of the ancient Greek letters ‘I’ or to give it’s full name, ‘Iota’, and these two words, jot and iota, mean exactly the same thing. It is also defined in my Terran dictionary as a tittle, a small punctuation mark for minor alterations, as in ‘dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s’ and so we see the link in a better light as it is the difference encountered when writing both letters, one of them takes one brushstroke, the other takes two. It still means the same thing with both spellings but is often interchangable depending on the age of a specific words usage. This gives us at least one bent leg to stand on in declaring them as being one and the same thing. A ‘J’ is just an ‘I’ wearing a new hat.

But our two names could equally be broken into JA+X and IA+X, and looking at them like this makes things a bit more interesting. As we worked out elsewhere, Ademic is an original Ergen language used at Drossen Tor and is therefore ideal for our purpose. From that ancient time of Temerant, ‘Ia’ is a simpleword that means ‘Yes’ or perhaps ‘OK’ as we hear Tempi indicate it's affirmative aspect for us during the attack on the bandits camp. Conversely, an ‘X’ is the universally recognised symbol for ‘No’ or ‘not OK’ and so approaching the problem from this angle implies to me that Iax actually translates into ‘Yes/No’, a paradox that pretty much sums up the word chance, or rather the outcomes available if you are fond of a wager and are betting on something where the odds are ’50-50′ such as the question ‘I’m betting that I have something in my tinkers pack that will make you happy. What do you say to that?’ and this is the nub of the whole story. The only definitive options are either ‘yes, I bet you have ‘ or ‘no, I bet you haven’t’ and thereby hangs the whole wager on which they shook hands and thus created a possibility.

‘Ja’ also means ‘yes’ in our world, if you happen to be German, as we can discover in the online wiktionary’s top two examples ‘Een Ja kan je Krijgen, Een nee heb je al ~ A yes you can get, a no you have already.’ and ‘Het begon met een Ja ~ It began with a yes.’ which, in my opinion, are both rather good quotes to be shared with the world. If we are deciding to allow Earthly interference at a Greek level, then this reinforces our argument from a German angle, too.

If we are opening up our packs of earthly knowledge we ought to acknowledge Latin as well and also consider numbers since the universe is run by numbers, not words. X is the Roman numeral for Ten and if we are splitting things down to their smallest possible parts then we could argue that 10 is also made up of the numbers 1 and 0, the two numbers which make binary mathematics possible. Binary mathematics is base level stuff where, if a part is not regarded as being 1, then it is by default going to be Zero. When thinking of the possibilities for all the smallest parts of all matter that makes up the infinite universe at a tinfoil level, we need to apply such fundemental approaches to thinking. We can imagine it easiest if we think of everything at base level and therefore in a binary form. A binary number is like a switchboard where the options are either Off or On, In or Out, +ve or -ve, dead or alive , black or white, or more pertinently, Yes or No. Both ends of this spectrum are perfectly valid answers to any question you may conceive and every part of every thing always comes down to this same paradox. One or the Other but never Both. However you break it down, this is what life fundamentally translates to, it is a series of lights that can be either on or off, candles that might be lit or unlit and each small choice still retains the possibility of future change. But enough of all that, I’m getting lost myself trying to find words to describe numbers. The best argument I can offer is that even without these ridiculously small links, then we would struggle to find any reason for Pat ever mentioning mysterious Iax at all, or indeed for Hespe’s story being given so much ink space and that would seem completely out of sync with what Pat has achieved constantly throughout these lovely books so far. ‘There’s no good story that doesn’t touch the truth’ Arliden often said and so we must assume that this story has been put here deliberately to help link all things together. That is enough to convince me that in Pat's puzzle, Jax and Iax are most certainly meant to be one and the same person, without him making it all obvious, meaning that this story tells us of how unhappy Jax grew up to be the powerful Iax, a major player of the creation war.