The Barrier Between Worlds

[spoonchicken]

Obviously there is a dividing barrier in between our real world, and the Land. So, what is it, and how shall we describe / catergorize it? Is it a Law that SRD hasn't yet discussed, much less explained? Does SRD even need to? What do we think of it? Is it a function of the Arch of Time, or something else? Wild magic has been demonstrated of being capable of bridging our worlds all by itself (see the end of TOT), so perhaps it's an extension/subsidary of the rules that govern the existance of the Arch? Or perhaps something a bit "simpler"? In the same way that the Laws of Life & Death defined a boundary between the living and the dead, perhaps this is simply just another Law of existance, that merely exists as a natural function / byproduct OF existance? I myself have no real thoughts one way or the other, so allow me to throw this post out at everyone to contemplate.

[Vader]

The Barrier is called "Sanity".

[Black Asgard]

I'm not sure if there is a barrier as we'd think about it. Covenant never really experiences the 'barrier' or insulating layer, as a concrete thing.

In LFB, he is in a dark realm, for better words--that reminds me, to a limited extent, of the place where he talks to the Creator at the end of TPTP.


In IW, he hits his temple and doesn't experience this, because he's unconscious. Upon exit in both LFB and IW, he exits by returning to the 'conscious' realm, waking up on his own. He does a similar thing at the end of TPTP, but it isn't quite waking up.

In the beginning of TPTP, Covenant first is summoned and the Land and the 'real world' blend together. Later, after he has saved the little girl and sucked the snake venom into his mouth (a terrible idea, by the way: don't ever do that; minute cuts in your mouth from flossing, brushing or just eating things with sharp edges, like potato chips, would leave perfect entrances for the venom to get into your body, killing you AND the person you're trying to save...just don't do it), and then he 'sank' into the Land.

I doubt there is a barrier, to be honest. I think it is as we are, and more.

While "Sanity" is a fair answer, I don't take the strict view that the Land is Unreal, nor that it is Real, but the fact that Donaldson wrote 8 (or, 9, if you count the upcoming Against All Things Ending) books about the Land screams to me that it is as real as Covenant/Donaldson need it to be.

I don't think Donaldson will get into the minutia surrounding the parallel existence, when he won't even tell us the real patterns of the timestream between A and B.

[spoonchicken]

Sanity doesn't work for me. Neither Hile Troy nor Linden Avery were insane. And the fuzziness TC experienced makes it vague enough for SRD to present the concept to us in any way we wants, leaving things vague enough to be interpreted any way the reader chooses. So, my original thesis still stands.

[Covenant786]

Everytime an event happens in which he nearly dies. Isnt the barrier Life and Death?

[wayfriend]

There is some indication, at various places during the narrative, that the boundary is related somehow to the boundary to life and death.

In the first Chronicles, we have Mhoram and Trevor, who theorized that it is possible to summon Covenant w/o the Staff of Law because the Law of Death has been broken. Then, later, they realized: Covenant had been so vulnerable to the summons because he was dying.

Troy was summoned by Atiaran. Notably, he was dying in a fire when it occurred.

In the Second Chronicles, Foul is able to summon Covenant only with blood and death. This time the Despiser had been forced to go to great lengths to take hold of Covenant. A specific location had been required, specific pain, a triangle of blood, freedom of choice and death. Covenant had to be dying from a mortal wound in order to be summoned.

There is more written here, but it is full of Last Chronicles spoilers.

[ninjaboy]

I'm not entirely convinced by this relationship between life and death.

Firstly, in the first Chrons, in the translations where Covenant was knocked out by hitting his head on that table and when he was knocked out by the taxi, he was essentially just unconscious. Sure such events can be fatal to a leper, but only if not taken care of, and even in the worst case, it would take months perhaps to die from such injuries. He was nowhere near the boundaries between life and death then.

And surely if the boundary b'ween L and D was so important, there would be hundreds of people in that queue at any time, if the 'real world' in the series is based upon our own. And yet there was only one 'accidental' transportation.. And all from the same country..

And to be fair I would be happy without knowing the answer to this question.

[wayfriend]

Firstly, in the first Chrons, in the translations where Covenant was knocked out by hitting his head on that table and when he was knocked out by the taxi, he was essentially just unconscious.

On the other hand, it's fair to say that every summonsing that ever happened involved to some degree the person being summoned being physically incapacitated. No one went to the Land when they were sleeping comfortably in their bed. That has to mean something.

If you think of being knocked unconscious as being dying, but just to a very small degree, it all sort of fits together.

[Black Asgard]

Last Chronicles Spoiler. Beware.

Spoiler

What about Jeremiah? He was off in the Land, supposedly, floatin' around. He wasn't in excruciating pain. He was just building proteins. I mean constructs.

[wayfriend]

There are some theories about that posted in the thread I linked above, where they don't have to be spoilered.

[ninjaboy]

Le Petit Mort..

[Wraith seeker]

The "barrier" may be no more than what quantum physics has already postulated about parallel universes (see the recent episode of "The Universe" for the theory). The only flaw people may see in this is the knowledge that exists on The Land's side about TC and LA's eventual coming, but every earth religion has messianic foretellings that in many cases are eerily accurate.