In your minds eye

[Krazy Kat]

I would bet Foul couldn't travel through Andelain, but I don't really know. I need to give this more thought. I suspect some of the answers lie in Soaring Woodhelven, because it ended in fire - which has a ring of logic to it.

Didn't the Staff of Law reach into Andelain and attack Covenant through his boots? A long time ago I took a short cut through a field on my way home and stepped on a dead cat. It was yuuuuuuuuuk!!!! That's always been how I imagine what Covenant felt when Drool zapped him with the Staff - but many times worst.

[Shuram Gudatetris]

Didn't the Staff of Law reach into Andelain and attack Covenant through his boots? A long time ago I took a short cut through a field on my way home and stepped on a dead cat. It was yuuuuuuuuuk!!!! That's always been how I imagine what Covenant felt when Drool zapped him with the Staff - but many times worst.

ROFLMFAOOL!!!!

[Solar]

This image (which I found by Googling the word 'hell') is pretty much how I imagined the Ritual of Desecration:



But with more asteroids.

[Krazy Kat]

same difference, but with more sheep

[aTOMiC]

I agree with those that imagine a nuclear holocaust. A radioactive firestorm that would take many centuries for the Land to recover from. Given the time period that SRD wrote the First Chronicles the threat of nuclear war was ever present.

But that's just what I imagine.

[wayfriend]

Some clues from the text. I posted these in another thread, but they are apropos here.

Under the spell of her voice, and the pressure of his vertigo, he had a momentary vision of what the Land must have looked like after Kevin had unleashed the Ritual of Desecration. Behind the luminous morning, he saw hills ripped barren, soil blasted, rank water trickling through vile fens in the riverbed, and over it all a thick gloom of silence - no birds, no insects, no animals, no people, nothing living to raise one leaf or hum or growl or finger against the damage.

Without transition, he found himself on Kevin's Watch. He stood on the stone platform like a titan, and with his malefic band he alone levied a new Ritual of Desecration upon the Land. All health withered before him. Great Gilden trees splintered and broke. Flowers died. Aliantha grew barren and became dust. Soil turned to sand. Rivers ran dry. Stonedowns and Woodhelvens were overthrown. Starvation and homelessness slew every shape of life that walked upon the earth. He was the Lord of a ruin more absolute than any other, a desolation utterly irreparable.

[Shuram Gudatetris]

Nice dig, wayfriend! Sounds very Sunbane-ish to me, which stands to reason.

The pic from my earlier post has been erased from existence, but I discovered this recently! I have NO IDEA when I drew this, but it was tucked safely away within my precious documents. Here's a snapshot:
(you get ONE GUESS as to which Trek movie inspired this )

[Holsety]

I came up with a haunting image as I read this - Kevin and Foul fight on the watch. Who knows what array of bolts, fireballs, and energy blasts careen off each other? Kevin lacks full knowledge of Foul as an immortal entity, so he manipulates Foul towards the edge of a cliff and tackles Foul, hoping to kill him by a great fall. Kevin desecrates the land by committing a suicide-homicide.

Why is this despair? Kevin has struck a blow against despite, and has not surrendered the land he fought for, after all. Kevin's particular act isn't the act of a hero choosing to end his life in order to help something else - not in the end. His desecration mirrors the death of the lord in TiW who is killed by his bloodguard bodyguard. Kevin is so thoroughly seized by defeat and despair and pain in trying to defeat the despiser and knowing that he can't that his action against the despiser is not motivated by love of the land, but by hate of the despiser. His decision to kill himself and kill Foul is not driven by a desire to protect the land, but by a desire to escape the severely terrible pain which Foul is capable of inflicting. Something along these lines.

RE the bloodguard and lord in TiW: think of the bloodguard, slaying the lord before he can surrender to Foul, as Kevin choosing to slay himself to avoid his own capitulation. We actually can reasonably say that Kevin didn't with full awareness surrender to Foul, because Elena had to call on him and command him to fight Foul for Kevin to be mastered and enslaved (I think).

Although Kevin's love of the land and his bravery made him a valuable ally of the land and strong, and his love of the land was real, his dedication, ability to resist despair or despite, etc., is only human, and in his case isn't capable of defeating hatred and hatred alone in the face of harm presented by Foul.

Valuable and precious feelings can be eroded in a human temporarily if they're faced with enough stress. We might say that means they weren't "true." But however we describe that breakdown, Kevin couldn't stay true to the Land against Foul. He was only dedicated to his own survival, and eventually a method to escape the pain he was in.

It was precisely Kevin striking a blow against himself and Foul simultaneously in order to no longer have to fight, to feel pain, to suffer, that caused the desecration.

I like this idea because it makes an interesting and sad use of Kevin's Watch (the location in the books!!!). Instead of allowing Kevin and Foul to view the results of the desecration, the structure itself lent itself to desecration (creating a permanent marring of the beauty of the structure - the land's beauty serving against a loyal inhabitant).
---
Another small musing; maybe whatever the desecration really was created Foul's creche.

[Holsety]

Another thought - that I think may be a bit too obvious.

"But the Power which upholds me has stood since the creation of Time. Therefore when Kevin dared me to unleash the forces that would strike the Land and all its accursed creations into dust, I took the dare. . . Together we stood in Kiril Threndor, blind Kevin and I. Together we uttered the Ritual of Desecration . . . "

Together we uttered...perhaps the Ritual of Desecration was muttered - the seven words together.

The lords never found all seven wards. Maybe Kevin saw that his knowledge could lead to desecration of the land, and he struck at locations where his own wards were located.

At that level, it wouldn't be clear for sure whether the damage done to the land was to indirect by destroying the wards which would educate future earthpower users, or the damage was done by having the teachings of the wards used to attack them themselves.

In the end this is just an "elaboration" on the basic idea that seems to guide most of our ideas about the desecration - Earthpower being used against the earth.