#which is sort of the opposite of the Wandenreich

[troius]

You’re welcome. I’m glad that hear all that. Also I feel like yhwach is a fave villain of mine. Which I feel is an unpopular conscientious.

also I still wonder, where in yhwach is the b sound. As in dub and Jpn I hear the Bach when he’s referred to by name.

Oh, I can actually answer this one!

Yhwach canonically was named after the God his people worshiped, which considering his name and the general Quincy aesthetic pretty much has to be the Judeo-Christian God.

Now, the funny thing about God is that there's a reason He's called God, and it stems from an ancient Jewish taboo on using God's true name. Perhaps as a part of an effort to identify God as the one true God, when surrounding religions had many. Nonetheless, God has a name, which is generally given in the Hebrew Bible as יהוה, or YHWH.

You'll notice there are no vowels there. That's because Biblical Hebrew doesn't have any consistent method for indicating vowels, and while later versions of the Hebrew Bible did include vowels, the taboo on saying the name out loud meant that rather than write in the vowels, the transcribers (often rabbis) would instruct the reader to instead say "Adonai", or "my Lord", which is why in English bibles you will often see the small-caps LORD in its place.

Modern scholars, drawing from a variety of extrabiblical sources, tend to think that YHWH was pronounced "Yahweh". But medieval scholars, not having those sources, resorted to using the vowels of "Adonai" as their pronunciation guide. They also pronounced the "י" more like a Latin "J", and the "ו" more like a Latin "V", with the result being that during the Reformation, the name "Jehovah" was used to translate YHWH as the Bible came into the common vernacular.

It's fallen out of favor in recent years, as the scholarly consensus has coalesced around "Yahweh", and most Bibles will simply dodge the issue and use LORD. But you still see it around, most commonly in the name of Jehovah's Witnesses, a Christian group which 1) aggressively evangelizes across the world; 2) refuses to recognize any worldly authority without the kingdom of heaven, and 3) believe in the imminent unification of heaven with earth and the transformation of the world into a paradise without death.

Jehovah's Witnesses actually have a fairly strong presence in Japan, with 214,000 members that came under increased scrutiny fairly recently. Anyways, "Jehovah" is spelled "エホバ", or "Ehoba" in Japanese, which is where the B comes from (Japanese not having a native "v" sound).

[siilbern]

@nonviiolent

    “Haschwalth. Your wounds have healed enough for you to be transferred to detention. Get up.” 

    Quiet fell over the hospital ward as the six cloaked escorts strode in the doorway and halted at the foot of his bed, resting the ends of their tridentlike spirit weapons on the stone floor. The awkwardly tall woman kneeling at the bedside a few rows away from his own paused in wrapping a bandage around a gash in her patient’s remaining leg, her mouth half open as if she was suspended in the space between thinking something and saying it.  A few patients opened their eyes and lifted their heads to stare. Presumably, penal officers weren’t a common sight here.

    Abruptly breaking from her seeming state of indecision, the lieutenant temporarily secured the head of the bandage and stood up, clearing her throat to get their attention. “It’s unlikely that the incision has completely healed yet, so we were planning on keeping him under supervision f--”

    “The commander-in-chief of the Onmitsukidō has ordered us to transfer the prisoner to detention.”

    They didn’t wait for the lieutenant’s confirmation before turning their attention back to him. “Get up.”

    She moved closer, straightening her normally slumped shoulders as she approached. Kotetsu remained silent until no more than a foot was left between her and the figure that had answered her objection, keeping her voice low when she did speak up. “Have you asked the Captain-Commander about this? Or is this just your Captain acting on her own accord?”

    Jugram disregarded the escalating conflict and the increasing number of stares from the other residents of the ward to focus his attention on retrieving the hospital provided waraji on the floor beneath the edge of the bed and slipping them onto his socked feet. If he hesitated until this was resolved, they undoubtedly would interpret it as an act of resistance.

    “Orders are orders, Lieutenant.”

    “Is the captain who issued them aware that we operated on his heart?”

    They ignored her. Jugram stood carefully, balancing himself with a white-knuckled grasp on the metal bedrail as he adjusted to the slight lightheadedness inherent to standing after spending most of one’s time in a hospital bed. In almost perfect sync, four of the six guards lifted their hands and produced cables of reishi between them and the heavy red collar that rested against his throat.

    “Hands behind your back.” 

    The woman’s harsh stare radiated disapproval as Jugram crossed one wrist over the other behind himself and allowed the shortest of the guards to lash them together. They proceeded to drape a loose white cloth over his head, an opaque garment reminiscent of a hangman’s hood. It fell to the level of his upper lip, covering his face and eyes while simultaneously still allowing him to watch his feet by looking down; presumably, this was simply because stumbling would inconvenience the armed escorts. 

    “He can’t exert himself,” the lieutenant persisted, although a slight air of resignation had begun to creep into her voice. “He is recovering from heart surgery.” She paused briefly, then added in a tone lower and more threatening than he’d been aware it had the potential to be, “I’ll be speaking to the Captain-Commander about this.”

    They ignored her.

-

    Haschwalth silently counted the paces as they crossed the city, well-aware of the low chatter starting to build in the streets. Prisoners weren’t an uncommon sight following the end of a war, but he strongly suspected that the Soul Society was taking a tellingly higher amount of precautions in his case, regardless of the fact that His Majesty’s Auswählen had completely stripped him of any power that would constitute a significant danger to them. Based on this display, it wouldn’t be difficult for a casual observer to come to the conclusion that he had been in some kind of command position. 

    He held his head high as they walked. He was unafraid of death, unafraid of them, and he intended to make that clear, even in his last days (or hours). The pride of the Quincies was unwavering, and he would be damned if he allowed them to forget as much.

    Jugram had counted their strides into the hundreds by the time the guards stopped and removed the veil covering his face. The sight that greeted him was abysmal: an empty stone cell separated from the barren corridors by tall, thick black metal bars and the dense barrier of reishi woven between them like the splints of a basket. The only natural light in the building entered through a narrow floor-to-ceiling gap in the opposite wall, from which he and the now-deceased former residents of this same enclosure could stare out at a high scaffold on the edge of a distant cliff.

    “It’s called the Sokyoku,” one of the masked figures said, following his gaze. “Prisoners in the repentance cell are allowed to watch it in the days leading up to their execution while they contemplate what they’ve done.”

    The shortest of the six lifted their hand and the metal door to the cell slid open, harshly scraping across the stone floor. “Get in.” As if I’m going to refuse. 

    The door slammed behind him as soon as he entered. His captors unbound his wrists once it had closed, but the weighty collar stayed on. Are you really that afraid of me?

    “Enjoy the view,” said the guard standing behind the shortest, a telltale smile in her voice. “You’ll be ashes in a few days, you piece of shit.” Such a statement was undoubtedly a breach in military conduct, but the other five didn’t seem to care. They simply turned and left, loudly shutting the tremendous metal door to the outside world behind them. Only he and the silence and the darkness remained. 

    What a barbaric way to perform executions, Jugram thought to himself as moved closer to the crudely constructed window and stared out at the hill. How the thing was supposed to work wasn’t entirely clear, but given the long, hinged blade standing erect a short distance away from it, he assumed that it was some sort of guillotine. The other alternative was similarly primitive: the wooden structure was a tremendous gallows, just like the ones used to hang murderers and thieves when he was a young man. 

    It didn’t come as much of a surprise that the Shinigami would choose a prolonged killing over the swift beheadings or rapid exsanguination the Wandenreich allowed their criminals and traitors. They had already demonstrated the limitless sadism they reserved for anyone they deemed an enemy, whether the ‘enemy’ be civilians or former comrades who had for one reason or another strayed from the fold. On top of that, their lack of real mettle had become quite apparent during the invasion. It made sense that the same people would be unable to personally lift a sword against an unarmed criminal, especially when the cruel option was the easier of the two.

    Lift a sword against a criminal--as he himself had done without hesitation. A touch of... something, something unpleasant twisted in Haschwalth’s chest, far beneath the still-aching sternum Kurotsuchi had cracked open to bring him back from the brink of an honorable death in the interest of securing for the Soul Society the pleasure of killing him themselves. The feeling was nebulous, dark, like a fog somewhere within the numbness brought on by His Majesty’s death. There was no point in thinking about any of it, so he didn’t, instead sinking back into the absent stupor that had filled most of his hours of late as he carefully lowered himself onto the stone bench against the cell’s right wall. What else was there to do? His Majesty was dead. Bazz was dead. The Schatten Bereich almost certainly would be destroyed.

    And they thought he had a reason to fear death.

    Idly, Jugram wondered if the lieutenant running the hospital ward would be fool enough to try and argue with whoever controlled the penal system as to whether or not he was in any condition to be moved. Certainly there was still pain, a slight discomfort from the shallow rise and fall of his chest alone, but ultimately, it didn’t matter. He was a drain on their medical resources in the aftershock of a war, and he was undoubtedly slated to die regardless. Her job had been futile on a larger scale from the beginning, if she’d come to perceive it as anything other than holding off death until they were able to kill him on their own time.

    He’d debated beating them to it during the first few days he had spent bedridden; in many ways, killing himself would be an act of resistance, the last way he could oppose them. You have captured me, but I won’t let you have the pleasure of killing me: such had been the logic. He didn’t, however - as appealing as this final gesture of spite was, Jugram also recognized that it would be seen as cowardice from their highest-ranking military officer. For the honor of the Wandenreich and for the pride of the Quincies, it would be better to display courage in the face of death and die unflinchingly, a final demonstration of fearlessness from a race that would presumably cease to exist within a few months.

    Remember this, it would say.

    Remember us. 

    Remember that we died resisting, not hiding in the shadows. 

    His thoughts were interrupted by the loud scrape of the tower’s outermost door sliding open and the sudden intrusion of bright light from the free world. The glow reduced the figure in the wide doorway to a silhouette, but it was an immediately recognizable - tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a wide straw hat. The Captain-Commander, as he’d expected.

    “You’ve come to inform me of my sentence,” Jugram said, without any particular inflection.