I find that I am thinking about Caer-Caveral all over again. Specifically, he broke the Law of Life, and I'm wondering why.
We all assume it was necessary. Necessary for Covenant to succeed against Lord Foul. And I don't doubt that: Caer-Caveral was far-seeing.
Furthermore, I have assumed that resurrecting Hollian and Anele was not the ultimate purpose. They were used to break the Law. But they were not the reason for wanting it broken. I just don't think that they were important enough to break the Law over, as important as they are.
I had always somehow thought that this act allowed Covenant to beat Foul, the way he did, at the end. That Covenant could not have come back from the Dead and interceded for the Arch unless that Law had been broken.
Covenant says as much.
But . . .In [u]White Gold Weilder[/u] was wrote:"Caer-Caveral made it possible. Hile Troy." An old longing suffused his tone. "That was the 'necessity' he talked about. Why he had to give his life. It was the only way to open that particular door. So that Hollian could be brought back. And so that I wouldn't be like the rest of the Dead — unable to act. He broke the Law that would've kept me from opposing Foul. Otherwise I would've been just a spectator."
But something is not quite right here.
At the end of Fatal Revenant, Linden resurrects Covenant.
Now I am confused. If Covenant came back from the dead to defeat Foul, then he's already resurrected, has been since WGW. It doesn't make sense to resurrect him again.
But if he wasn't resurrected when he defeated Foul ... if he was still Dead with a big D ... then I don't see why the Law of Life needed to be broken.
Earlier, Covenant said
That doesn't sound like he was resurrected. Not in the way Hollian was resurrected in Andelain. In fact, he sounds as Dead as he could be."I don't have your hands — can't touch that kind of power anymore. I'm not physically alive. And I can be dismissed. I'm like the Dead. They can be invoked — and they can be sent away."
Furthermore, we have seen Dead Kevin destroy Elena, we have seen Dead Elena weild the Staff of Law, we have seen dead zombies piling up before the gates of Revelstone. The Dead were never "unable to act" as far as I can tell.
How can one make sense of all of this?
Now I am starting to wonder if Caer-Caveral wasn't thinking REALLY far ahead when he broke the Law of Life. Is it possible that he broke the Law of Life so that, 3,500 years later, Linden could resurrect Covenant in Andelain at the end of Fatal Revenant?
For it is now, finally, that Covenant is truly resurrected, in the way that Hollian was resurrected. It seems to finally be what Caer-Caveral promised could be done.
We have one other clue. We know that Caerroil Wildwood supported that end. He placed the runes on Linden's new Staff of Law so that she could accomplish this very thing. And Caer-Caveral was Wildwood's acolyte. It could be that Wildwood's plan for Covenant's resurrection could have included preparing Hile Troy so that one day he could break the Law of Life and open the door?
And if Anele is as important as we all feel he is, then it's a plan that pulls a lot of things together. The Law of Life might have been broken 3,500 years before it was needed for Covenant, because Anele needed resurrecting at that time. Anele may not be the reason the Law was broken - but if it was to be broken, it makes perfect sense to use that chance to bring back someone who is really needed.
The only thing that mars this whole theory is Covenant's remarks quoted above, that his defeat of Foul at the end of WGW required the Law of Life to be broken. That he could not have acted being Dead otherwise.
Consider if Covenant had not said that. Then Caer-Caveral's last act would have made no sense with respect to the Second Chronicles.
I think Donaldson needed it to make sense, in case his Chronicles ended there. And so he decided to make it seem necessary for the ending. But this would have been a secondary consideration, an adjustment that needed to be made at the time, something not driven by the real core of the story. I would go so far as to say that the breaking of the Law of Life could have been omitted from WGW, and the ending would have worked out just as well. No one would have questioned Covenant's ability to act while he was dead.
So we have this. In WGW, Covenant was able, through the breaking of the Law of Life, to come into the world of the Living only a little bit. He's just peaking in, not crossing over, if you will. He's not "in" enough to be resurrected, like Hollian. But he's in just enough to allow him to impose his will against Foul and save the Arch. After this was done, he popped back into being Dead again.
And now Linden has truly resurrected him. He's crossed over the boundary between life and death completely now.
And that was what Caerroil Wildwood and Caer-Caveral had planned all along.