Why didn't Kevin warn the Old Lords?

[Borillar]

One thing I've wondered about is why Kevin didn't warn the Old Lords prior to enacting the Ritual of Desecration. He warned the Bloodguard and Ramen/Ranyhyn so that they'd survive, so why not tell the Old Lords as well? I have two theories:

1) Kevin knew that, unlike the Bloodguard, the Old Lords wouldn't leave without an explanation, and might try to stop him.

2) It mentions at one point that Lord Foul's presence among the Council led to some unsavory things happening, perhaps some Lords engaging in betrayal or something else? Perhaps Kevin wanted the Council wiped out so that it would start over...

Thoughts?

[dlbpharmd]

Were there any Old Lords left after the slaughter by the ur-viles?

[duchess of malfi]

I was always under the impression that most of the Council had been killed, as dlb said, either at Mount Thunder, or perhaps in the other fighting after that ambush.

I always have thought that the loss of his beloved friends/colleagues was part of why Kevin became lost in his despair...

[danlo]

That's exactly right!

[matrixman]

In LFB, Mhoram tells Covenant that High Lord Kevin "sent in his stead some of his truest friends and strongest allies" to meet with the Demondim. So not all the Old Lords on Kevin's Council were killed, but having the strongest of them slain was just as bad. And, like duchess said, because these were also Kevin's closest friends, the guilt he felt over their deaths must have played a huge part in driving him over the edge into despair.

1) Kevin knew that, unlike the Bloodguard, the Old Lords wouldn't leave without an explanation, and might try to stop him.

Sounds plausible, Borillar. The problem is that we're grasping at straws since SRD gives us very little information about the people and events immediately surrounding the Ritual of Desecration. We still don't know exactly how many Lords Kevin had on his Council. And what was the character of the remaining Lords? Did at least one or two of the strongest Lords stay with Kevin and not go to meet with the Demondim? Or was Kevin left only with relative "weaklings" on his Council afterwards? If so, then perhaps these lesser Lords did not feel it was their place to question anything Kevin did.

Or maybe all the remaining Lords died in the full scale war against Foul before Kevin reached his decision to enact the Ritual, so there was nobody left on the Council to warn.

2) It mentions at one point that Lord Foul's presence among the Council led to some unsavory things happening, perhaps some Lords engaging in betrayal or something else? Perhaps Kevin wanted the Council wiped out so that it would start over...

Could you quote the passage that talks about that, just to clarify? I don't recall anything about the other Lords possibly engaging in betrayal. As for Kevin...well, with the Ritual, looks like he wanted to wipe out the Land, never mind the Council, in order to start all over.

In one part of the Elohimfest video interview, SRD talked about his view of Kevin as an "egomaniac" and how the High Lord suffered from a "God complex." Not a flattering portrait of Kevin, eh? When you consider the amount of power he held in his hand and his thousand-year reign, Kevin was practically a god of his world. So doing merely his human best to save the Land wasn't enough for him. He was either going to save his world, dammit, or tear it down if he couldn't.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, maybe it also leads to absolute despair. When you have the kind of near-limitless power that Kevin had, but you find yourself still unable to save that which you love, what does that do to you?

I think I ran off topic. Yeah, that's it: Unrestrained, unchecked message posting corrupts absolutely...

[Borillar]

I admittedly am having some trouble finding the passage I'm looking for that deals with what happened when Lord Foul was among the Old Lords (i.e. whether he somehow turned them against each other). But I'm sure it's out there somewhere!

The closest I've found thus far is Hile Troy's statement that ""By the time Foul declared himself and broke into open war, he'd had time for so much subtle treachery that he was unbeatable." But I'm pretty sure there's something more specific than that somewhere, most likely in the First Chronicles.

[Borillar]

Oh, also here's something else from Runes that supports theory #1 (that the Old Lords wouldn't have left if Kevin told them what was going on):

Spoiler

Stave tells Linden that "In that Ritual, the old Lords and many of their most precous works were swept from the land."

So some of the Old Lords were still around when the Ritual happened.

[MrKABC]

It could be that since Lord Foul had contrived his way onto the Council of Lords, Kevin had felt that maybe none of the surviving Old Lords could be trusted.

I am trying to remember where the quote appears - "Power that is not enough to accomplish a heart's desire will recoil upon the wielder" essentially meaning that even though High Lord Kevin possessed the power of a god, he was still insufficient to meet the Land's need, so his power destroyed him (via his despair).