Urbanite Roadroamer wrote:I just found this forum, so forgive me if this post has been covered...but I have a big problem with the big choice Linden makes. In going back for the Staff of Law, she basically acknowldges that she is the one that took it all those years ago, made Anele crazy and allowed Kevin's Dirt to happen.
What if she decided not to do it at all? One of the central points of the previous 6 books is free will. Time travel and paradoxes (paradoxi?) wreak ahvoc on free will issues, because viewing the effects of a cause you WILL effect in the past, necessitates a series of actions you HAVE to take in the future.
The Haruchai became the Masters after the Staff was lost. If Anele still wielded it (as was the birthright from Sunder and Hollian) he would not have gone insane, could have bested (or at least evaded) the Masters thereby educating the people of the Land as to it's true nature.
Actually, the Staff was lost WITHOUT Linden getting it... Anele left it behind, entered the caesure, and was transported forward in time; the Waynhim perceived the Staff's presence and lack of a guardian, and recovered it to hide it so no one could use it for wrong ends. If Linden hadn't gone back into the past, the Staff would have simply stayed hidden where the Waynhim left it (and no one living would have known its location, because as we know the Waynhim were being damaged, and slowly killed because the Law of the Staff interacted with the absence of Law in their essences).
So, if Linden had said, "no, I won't go get the Staff into the past", history would have gone on exactly the same way, except that the Staff would have been hidden and (presumably) unfindable. Possibly, the mere existence of the Staff wouldn't have been able to prevent Kevin's Dirt either (Linden supposes it could have, but since she doesn't yet know the true origin of Kevin's Dirt, her theory is unproven - maybe the Staff would have had that power only if it had a wielder to use it).
Urbanite Roadroamer wrote:Time travel always seems to be a very difficult plot device for authors (and readers). I hope this will resovle itself in a more satisfying way in the next books. It seems too easy to have the horses able to manage time travel, the Demondim slip into the future, Esmer able to move through time at will, the Elohim supposedly don't have a problem with time travel...This begs too many questions like if Findail could have gone into the future and witnessed evetns, he would have known the end of WGW.
Probably because the ability of the Elohim to time travel could have potentially broken the Law of Time if used often, so they would refrain from using it too much. And - if Findail had gone to the future and seen the events at the end of WGW - say, his melding into the new Staff of Law together with Vain - what would he have done? He could have done two things:
1) Continue on as if nothing had happened (but think of the suffering he would have endured, knowing his destiny without being able to change it);
or
2) Change events (for examples, pressing Covenant and/or Linden to give him the ring, or arranging events so that they would be forced to, and so on). But if he did that - well, in that case, the future he saw could have never happened... and we get into a new time paradox, including a brand-new violation of the Law of Time...
And as for the Ranyhyn, we were never told the limits of their abilities. And they aren't able to move through time - rather, they have a different perception of time than people do. We, after all, don't even know how long a Ranyhyn lives. But anyway: if the Elohim can theoretically move through time, then the fact that Esmer has the same ability, or one very similar, is conceivable. And the Demondim had much of the lore of the Viles, which - we are told - was greater in some parts than the lore of the Old Lords, because it dealt with matters the Old Lords didn't dare study. Since the Old Lords were devoted to Earthpower and Law, it stands to reason that the areas they weren't interested in were lore which would break or warp natural laws - such as the Law of Time.
Urbanite Roadroamer wrote:On two different topics:
If the caesures started when Joan got her ring back, where did the Demondim come from? And, if the caesures produce a location where all moments exist at one time, then shouldn't they stay in one place forever?
OK, one last question, why could Roger have gone out, bought a White Gold ring and brought it with him into the Land? He could have bought a White Gold necklace, bracelets, some medallions and we could have called the next book after Fatal Revenant "Bling-Bling Wielder"
1) If you consider the caesures as "holes" in the normal structure of time, what's the problem? Let me make an example. Imagine a sheet of blank paper and consider that the map of the Land. Then place a stack of transparent sheets on it - each of them is a moment in Time.
Place a dot with a marker on the same place on each transparent sheet; from above, you only see a dot, but if you look at it from the side, the various dots form a three-dimensional object which spans the whole stack of sheets. That is a caesure.
Now move the caesure around by moving the whole stack of transparent sheets around the map of the Land. There - a caesure which roams the Land, joining together all moments in Time, while the different moments in Time (the transparent sheets) don't automatically change or get mixed up just because the caesure is moving.
Of course, this is a semplification, but still... it should give you an idea
2) As was said before, if TC is the White Gold, then it's probable that the ring of his is the only ring which is capable of wielding such power. Remember what had happened to the original Staff of Law, as Covenant saw in the Soothtell of the Clave? The Staff had been made to uphold Law and in time, it had become the
incarnation of Law, so its destruction had weakened Law. By the same token, maybe Covenant's ring - due to its association with him and its long stay in the Land, coupled with being the focus of Foul's mad desire - has become the epitome of White Gold.
) actions.
