I've had an idea about the answer to the question I raised a few replies back.
myself wrote:I really can't buy into the idea that the other Elohim are so worried about Findail's fate. [...] All in all, I think that the outcome that Felice and the other Elohim were avoiding at TC's cost was not the Findail piece, but something else!
Then I was discussing something on the Theories topic which led me to examine an SRD interview, which led me to something that I think is germaine. It wasn't that the words gave me the idea so much as that they helped me realize I was maybe on the right track.
INTERVIEW: October 1991 wrote:The two stories together are a kind of moral hierarchy: the first one is relatively simple concerned with muscle; the second is a test of sacrifice in relationships - Covenant can't save The Land alone in The Second Chronicles , and neither can Linden Avery. It takes what they can both give, and what they can both give up, to save The Land.
(Emphasis is mine.) At some point I would like to draw up, or discover where someone has already drawn up, a list of parallels between the First and Second Chronicles. Until then, it is firm in my mind that the
Elohim are, in some respects, the Hile Troy of the Second Chronicles. Which is to say, they are a Covenant foil, even a specific kind of Covenent foil - a foil which illuminates The Wrong Way To Go.
So on to my hypothesis: The
Elohim have the power to save the world, but they are unable to tolerate that they cannot do this without assistance.
This is why they are ill disposed towards Vain. He represents a view, one which they might very well find to be correct, that this time the world cannot be saved by
just the Elohim. That there is another necessary force in the Earth which provides what they lack. (And it's certain that they lack - the resolution of Vain's mystery asserts this.)
This is why they imprisoned Vain, and didn't destroy him, and then essentially let him go. They had to admit that he might be necessary.
Certainly the
Elohim demonstrate the haughtiness on which this theory rests.
This
Elohim conflict highlights by contrast the plights of Covenant and Linden. Covenant cannot save the Land by himself either. But he, unlike the
Elohim, can find a way to deal with that. And the same goes for Avery as well.
We know the
Elohim lie. When they say "He is a peril to us" et. al. they are being misleading without outright lying. The peril represented by Vain is not the peril of destruction, but the peril of truth. Indeed, he was directed with great skill to coerce them from their path - the path of arrogance which suggests the world will not be saved unless it can be saved by the
Elohim solely. Indeed, they "will never endure" it.
.
) said the same thing you did, and someone else pointed out these things.
