First, regarding the possibility of Foul's destruction due to the Worm - not only dlb correctly asks whether we can trust everything Findail said, but even what Findail said about him could be taken both as a fact and as a question. In fact, the way it is phrased leads me to believe that the Elohim seriously underestimate Foul. In the SC, they didn't act against him because he is a "human problem" (despite the fact that he wanted to break the Arch of Time and destroy the world), and they only sent an Appointed when humans came to their lands. Even in the Last Chronicles, the Elohim seem more concerned with Kastenessen and the skurj than they are with Foul (who might well be - and is implied to be - the one who allowed Kastenessen to escape in the first place).
I have a feeling that the Elohim consider Foul not to be their equal - they believe he is weaker, less powerful than they are, more circumscribed perhaps. Maybe this is because of his imprisonment, or maybe because the Elohim being Earthpower incarnate, they cannot see Foul completely for what he truly is (that is, they see the surface but not the essence of Foul).
Wayfriend wrote:Xar wrote:Not really - the Theomach mentions that if he had not altered Roger's time travel destination, the Elohim would have.
Okay. So the Elohim are preventing all time travel. And so the only way Roger could go back in time and get to the Blood is to take Linden. Because then the Elohim would not stop them; they would rely on Linden to. If I understand this theory correctly.
Which means that Linden is the only one allowed to travel backwards in time. At least as far as the Elohim are concerned.
I suppose Esmer must get a special dispensation for some reason. The Elohim did not stop him bringing forward the Demondim. Unless, again, they knew that Linden would take care of it.
And they didn't stop the Demondim from going backward in time to get to the Illearth Stone. Again, I suppose because Linden would deal with it.
And they didn't stop the Mahdoubt from going back in time. Because Linden yada yada yada.
So, in other words ... nobody was doing any travelling backwards in time until inden came along. Poor Linden.
This doesn't hold up somwhere. But I can't put my finger on it.
Esmer likely doesn't need dispensation and cannot be stopped - he is part Elohim, and you'd think that if the Elohim could prevent Kastenessen's legacy from being spread, they would have taken it from his lover, or from the merewives. Likely, the Elohim believe that Esmer, being part Elohim himself, cannot break the Arch of Time by himself, and therefore they do not have sufficient reasons to prevent him from traveling.
The Demondim didn't "go back in time"; they took a caesure, controlled it, and used it FROM THE PRESENT to siphon off the Illearth Stone's power. the only "time travel" involved here is that of the Illearth Stone's power from the past to the present, and that doesn't threaten the Arch because all leads us to believe that the Illearth Stone's power cannot be exhausted.
The Mahdoubt apparently has many gifts (the fact that she raised no questions in Revelstone is one of them), and she could simply have "slipped through" without the Elohim noticing; or, given that as the Harrow says, she was well-known at a time, the Elohim might know she is no threat to the Arch of Time (the same reason why they allowed the Theomach to divert Roger's destination, or trusted him to take care of the possible problems).
There is another question that just came to mind, which I find more interesting (and probably I'll ask on the GI): we are told by Roger and the Theomach that caesures cannot exist in a time when the Law of Death and the Law of Life were still undamaged; that is, caesures span time from the present to the breaking of those Laws only. In fact, if Linden created a caesure in a time when both Laws were whole, she could break the Arch herself.
Then where do the Demondim take the Illearth Stone's power from? If we assume that the breaking of the Law of Death is the limit of when caesures can go, it means they must have been siphoning it off the Stone between The Illearth War and The Power That Preserves - but I find it hard to believe Foul wouldn't have noticed, since he possessed the Stone (unless he DID notice, and it was this noticing that gave him the idea for the attack on Time in the first place...). Alternately, what Linden believes is that they siphoned off the power from a time when the Stone was still buried - but how could that be, if the caesures cannot get that far?
