Whats up with Linden being way weaker in Runes?

[Dirty Whirl]

In the second chronicles, after linden had worked out how to use her health sense, she had no problem using the white gold. She could summon power from it with ease, either from covenant while he was wearing it, or even when it was meters away from her on the floor under mt thunder.
Yet, in runes, accessing white gold goes back to the old 'under extreme stress and emotion', basically only as a very last resort. Sure, some of the time shes lost her health sense, or is under esmers nufflification field (whats up with that, by the way? I though law and stuff couldn't touch white gold) but even when she does manage to access it she can't use it for more than a short time, and is tired by the exertion.
This is alot different to the times when she uses it in the second chronicles.
Wild magic also seems less powerful to heal then compared to the second chronicles. Remember the giant on the boat who linden healed? I think I remember the giant standing up and being amazed at being fully healed (not sure though). This seems alot different to the healing linden performs on Stave, which just seems to be like cauterizing internal wounds together.

[Zarathustra]

You'll find a lot of agreement here. Wayfriend has noted an unsatisafaction about the difference in which Linden handles white gold between the two chronicles--among others.

I think the answer is: because Donaldson wanted it that way. His priorties are changing, in spite of what has gone before. All in all, I think he's made an admirable job of retaining consistency, considering the vastness of this work.

[Nerdanel]

I'm going to look into this in my reread. This is far too complex matter to be solved by flipping through the pages for relevant scenes, and different uses of power would obviously have different mp costs while Linden's time and opportunity to recover mp between uses may also... Oops, wrong medium. But anyway...

Have you noticed that Linden's health sense is weaker than it used to be? Outside of Kevin's Dirt too? Well, she hasn't noticed, but it's been ten years after all... There is a little scene in TWL about the change in the morning sun that demonstrates the relative sensibilities of the current company (Linden > Haruchai > everyone else). I have a feeling the old Linden would have seen right through Kevin's Dirt just like the Haruchai do, and sensed the approaching caesure at the Verge of Wandering before Stave did.

I'm probably the only person on the entire board who believes Linden is a leper nowadays, only she hasn't noticed it yet, just like Covenant didn't notice his early symptoms either, resulting in two of his fingers having to be amputated. I have a thread about this somewhere.

[Zarathustra]

I'm probably the only person on the entire board who believes Linden is a leper nowadays, only she hasn't noticed it yet, just like Covenant didn't notice his early symptoms either, resulting in two of his fingers having to be amputated. I have a thread about this somewhere.

That. Is. Freakin'. Cool.

Wow, you are the Queen of Theories No One Has Thought Before.

[Nerdanel]

And I'm afraid, Nerdanel, that there is simply no proof and no rational explanation that could accurately offer a convincing reason for Linden to have leprosy. There's simply no way for it to have happened.

The thread about leprosy in the Land was possibly my most soundly unaccepted one ever. The thread went all over the place and eventually included appealing to dictionary definitions and debating on whether or not grass green and emerald green could be said to have "nothing in common" on the basis of the visual difference alone. Oh, the times...

This is the specific post about Linden's signs of leprosy (do not mistake for a thread start if you follow this link) in the Prologue. I maintain the collected weight of the evidence suggests that Linden is indeed a leper, even though none of the signs alone would be nearly enough. But remember, probabilities are multiplicative, so that if there's a 5% chance for the teacup dropping indicating leprosy and similarly 5% for running in her socks, the combined probability of leprosy rises to 1 - (1 - 0.05)*(1 - 0.05) = 9.75% and there are a lot of small points.

[I'm Murrin]

...Except, having being healed with Hurtloam, there is no place for it to be used as a plot point, and thus there is no reason for it to be true.

[dlbpharmd]

I've been complaining ever since ROTE came out about Linden's use of wild magic and her diminished health sense. Hopefully SRD will explain this in FR.

[Nerdanel]

I've addressed the issue with hurtloam in the other thread. Basically, I'm arguing that hurtloam cannot affect leprosy any more. On the surface, the Land looks fine, but when you dig into it things aren't that way at all. I think we don't yet know the half of it.

[Nom vs. Vain]

Lindens being "weak" is correlating to the simple fact that her health sense is blocked and or deminished by Kevins dirt. With our her ability to see, she has less control of the power she has. I believe it is even mentioned that she is having a much harder time finding the power within herself so that she can draw it up and manipulate it. Perhaps you've hit something there Nerdanel, it's certainly something I could see happening. After all they did bump uglies... and no one really knows how leprosy is tranfered.

[wayfriend]

Well, it took Covenent more than one Chronicles to weild the wild magic potently. I expect it will take Linden just as long. So far, she has really had far, far less experience.

As I have been pointing out in the dissection, she seems to be having problems with first having passion, which enables the wild magic. I don't think she's caught on to the fact that you can't use wild magic clinically, like a scalple.

What I am hoping to find is that this plays into the ring / staff dilemma that she later has. She cannot use both at the same time. I suspect that the reason is that, mentally, in once case she needs her passions flowing, and in the other, not. And that Esmer can seemingly block her access to the wild magic by getting her out of her passionate place and into her logical place. I'm not sure about this yet, but I hope to see if it holds up as the dissection continues.

[Aleksandr]

In the second chronicles, after linden had worked out how to use her health sense, she had no problem using the white gold. She could summon power from it with ease, either from covenant while he was wearing it, or even when it was meters away from her on the floor under mt thunder.

When Linden tapped the White Gold in the 2nd Chronicles it was always in close proximity to a source of power which (as we know from the 1st Chronicles) tends to wake up the potential in White Gold. The source of power was of course the venom in TC, which made him a walking White Gold time bomb.
Also, in the final scene in Kiril Threndor the White Gold has just had Lord Foul evoke absolutely titanic forces from it when Linden uses it and so it probably hasn't settled down to inertness yet.

I'm more curious about why there's a problem with using both Staff and Ring since Linden used both without contradiction when she healed the Sunbane.

[Believer]

I still think that Covenant's needing to be near a source of power in the 1st chrons was more his defense mechanism against having the power of the wild magic than a true requirement.

I also think that the use of Earthpower (Staff of Law) requires passion, and so I'm not sure there's a passion / logic dichotomy. Although, Mhoram and his successors tried to find a way to tap into Earthpower without the passion required by Kevin's Lore. Hmm... I dunno how to incorporate that.

Weren't there lines in the 1st chrons indicating that wild magic is the opposite of law? Maybe just by it's very nature, there's a contradiction. As to whether why it was possible when curing the Sunbane. Hmm.... Good question.

[finn]

I maintain the collected weight of the evidence suggests that Linden is indeed a leper, even though none of the signs alone would be nearly enough. But remember, probabilities are multiplicative, so that if there's a 5% chance for the teacup dropping indicating leprosy and similarly 5% for running in her socks, the combined probability of leprosy rises to 1 - (1 - 0.05)*(1 - 0.05) = 9.75% and there are a lot of small points.

I would have to say the weight of evidence is clearly the other way, Xar provides evidence, reference and sound logic as evidence and wins the day hands down over "a feeling it might be despite the evidence" or some derivative of Chaos theory.

I think all major and minor points are answered conclusively to the effect that the chances of Linden having leprosy are nil, the chances of leprosy being able to be contracted and minifested within the life-cycle of the chronicles is nil, SRD with his insights in Leprosy would know this and the only way your conclusion can be realised is if he decides to change the scientific proofs surrounding Leprosy in the real world, for the Land.

Joan to my mind is a different case and her being intimate with TC whilst he was infected is a possibility. However the nature of the disease means that even if she transfered it to the land it would still take any new infection transfer many years...maybe caesures could take the disease into the past and see it developed into the present? Linden may then be the cure, but not the cause.

[Xar]

Lindens being "weak" is correlating to the simple fact that her health sense is blocked and or deminished by Kevins dirt. With our her ability to see, she has less control of the power she has. I believe it is even mentioned that she is having a much harder time finding the power within herself so that she can draw it up and manipulate it.

I would assume Linden's weakness could also be - at least in part - because all in all it's been ten years since last she was to the Land, and had a chance to use her health-sense and/or the white gold. Not only, as it was mentioned above, when she used it before the ring was always close to the envenomed Covenant, but also she might have forgotten how to properly use it, or perhaps - since she only used the ring herself once (without Covenant as an intermediate wielder), and in that situation her emotions were far stronger and more complex than they are now, it's possible she simply has no clue on how to wield wild magic properly. At the time, she was saddened by Covenant's death, glad because the Despiser had been defeated and Covenant was not completely gone, determined to remove the Sunbane, hurt by the apparent sacrifice of Pitchwife and the First, and she had just gone through an epiphany herself, in which she had realized her nature and had rejected it (when she had possessed Covenant and then decided to trust him).
In RoTE, she only has one driving emotion - finding her son - and she seems to be going about it in a dreadfully clinical way, considering that for all she knows, Jeremiah could be suffering unspeakable tortures in Foul's abode.
As far as I can see, I think Linden's differences in wielding white gold and the Staff of Law, but also (to tie in with another thread) Linden's "darkening", are caused by the fact that in the past ten years, she's lost sight of the true lessons of the Land. The feeling I have whenever I read something from Linden's POV is that she is persuaded she knows what she learned from the Land, but what she persuades herself she has learned, and what she should have learned, are two entirely different things, I think. Compare Covenant's response to the Land in the Second Chronicles, upon arriving, with Linden's: there was far more passion in Covenant's words when he spoke with the people of the Land, while Linden seems to see everyone, at least a bit, in a simple way: "how can they help me find my son?". Understandable, perhaps: Linden is more logical than Covenant, and less openly passionate, so it might be that she is still at the stage in which she cannot find the center of the paradox - she can't see that "how to find her child" and "how to save the Land" aren't mutually exclusive, and that caring for one shouldn't mean she shouldn't care for the other as well with the same importance.

Did anyone else think that perhaps the old man didn't come to Linden simply because he thinks it would be useless, or possibly just make things worse? Because, unlike Covenant, she didn't learn the lessons the old man hoped she would learn? She suspects he's the Creator, or at least that he knows about the Land and its plight, so it's obvious that if he appeared, she would have questions for him...

[DukkhaWaynhim]

Covenant is the white gold. Not Linden. He can give her the ring, and let her use spillover power, and whatever, but Linden is not the white gold. Linden was able to use the white gold in Covenant's presence because Covenant (and his passions) were nearby.
Linden has a greater affinity for the Staff, but her ability to wield it is limited by her ability to see, and Kevin's Dirt occludes that pretty effectively.
At the risk of sounding THOOLAH-ish, her ability to use any power is diminished by her distress/indecision - remember that she is beside herself with dismay/guilt/anxiety at Jeremiah's kidnapping. .

In the SC, I think she had an easier time of using the power because she was more dispassionate - it was Covenant's passion that fueled it before, and her skills as a doctor that allowed her to use a tool at hand.

In ROTE, Covenant isn't around to be the catalyst for the wild magic, and she is more frantic than focused in her budding quest - she cannot be both source and focus for white gold.

DW

[danlo]

[JD]

Linden was always uncomfortable using Wild Magic, she felt as if she was possesing Covenant to use it. In Runes, she also did not like to use it, she knew the ring was Covenant's and preferred to use the Staff of Law, which she was the only one in the 2nd Chronicles that had Health Sense.

[Earthpower]

Im not good with words (Why I don't post much) so please excuse me. I'm on my 3rd read of Runes and one thing I notice about Linden is she seems to lack focus and or concentration through most of the book. The first reason I believe is her son. The second reason is her love for TC. The third reason is her love for the land. The forth problem is she is not a leader.

Her main focus is her son but as time goes by in the land she realizes how much she misses TC and how much she loved the land. She is also coming to grips that she is in charge. This all plays in her problems with using wild magic let alone the unknown factors like Kevin's Dirt, Esmer, Ceasures, etc.. Just a thought.

[wayfriend]

Welcome back, EP.

I agree with you except for the leader part. Linden runs a hospital in real life, and in the Land she does an admirable job. Yes, she struggles to make choices, but she struggles to make the right ones, and that's a good thing in a leader.

It took Covenant three books to learn how to weild the ring the way you expect Linden to.

[Earthpower]

Welcome back, EP.

I agree with you except for the leader part. Linden runs a hospital in real life, and in the Land she does an admirable job. Yes, she struggles to make choices, but she struggles to make the right ones, and that's a good thing in a leader.

It took Covenant three books to learn how to weild the ring the way you expect Linden to.

When I talked about being in charge / leadership I was thinking about how alone she is when it comes to who is around her. This time we have no TC, no Giants, no Sunder, who all had power and or leadership abilites. This time she has Stave who she doen't even trust for most of the book and Liand who was not much help in the power / leadership department. The Ramen seem to worship her more then anything else. Then we have Anele and Esmer who don't feel those rolls ethier. Then last is the ur-viles who are not much in the communication department.