Covenant's Summoning

[Xar]

Here is something which always makes me think there should be more to it, whenever I re-read WGW... it's at the end, when Covenant speaks with Linden while she's going back to the real world.

What is it Covenant summons from Drool's mound at the end of WGW? He says he used all the wild magic power Foul had pumped into him to save Pitchwife and the First by raising "something" from Drool's mound, but he didn't really know what it was he summoned. He says it didn't last long, but obviously, his attention was focused on Kiril Threndor at that time, so it could be feasible he didn't notice the "thing" fleeing or disappearing or even "evolving" into a form which would pass unnoticed. Was it a demondim-like or zombie-like version of Drool? Another new entity altogether? A jumble of bones and carcasses which went "boo!" until it disassembled? Covenant was so focused on Kiril Threndor at the moment that his using wild magic to raise that thing always sounded like something done without paying really attention to what it would do exactly... kind of waving a hand negligently towards Drool's mound and go "I want something that gives the Giants a chance to escape". And of course, being just Dead, he might have still been a little confused by the shift in perception and adjustment to his new state.

Or it could simply be a red herring. What do you think?

[Nerdanel]

I think it could be foreshadowing for the Last Chronicles around the lines of "expect that sort of stuff to happen in the future". Some unexpected Dead characters could be coming back in the flesh. It could also be that the summoning was for real

Spoiler

and was a Demondim

who then just elected to leave the place.

[Xar]

Well, I did start wondering - the cavewights were already supplying "power" to the resurrection ritual, hoping to resurrect Drool; it could be that Covenant's wild magic ended up "overcharging" the whole thing and summoning something more than the cavewights or Covenant had intended.

Spoiler

A Demondim would be a possibility, given what we know about them in RotE, but it would mean that either Covenant summoned one from the past, or he created one on the spot. Alternatively, there was a dead Demondim in or below the mound, and Covenant resurrected it by mistake. The main point against it is that all these possibilities sound like they would require some concentration to do so, which Covenant plainly didn't have to focus on the mound at the time.

But I don't think it was foreshadowing - at least, not in the sense you mention it. It would be too gratuitous, I believe, and also, the meaning the resurrection had - for the Cavewights, and for Covenant as well, since he and Foul are likely the only beings who remember Drool - was quite big... Then again, I could be mistaken

[Nerdanel]

If the summoned being was Drool he would have been in quite an unrecognizable and monstrous shape.

Spoiler

Since the pile was quite old there could have been a Demondim in it.

I don't think Covenant would have necessarily had to concentrate specifically in order to summon a Demondim. It could have been that he merely raised the most powerful entity in the pile without having any idea what it was. He had never met a Demondim and had no idea what they looked like or what they could do.

If the pile had nothing but Cavewight bones in it (I can't remember right now if that was the case), then the summoned being would have been a dead Cavewight (Drool?) in a bizarre blending body, multiple Cavewights blended into one or

Spoiler

a Demondim who had been wearing a Cavewight when it was killed in the Ritual of Desecration (and missed in Esmer's "rescue operation") and later carried by surviving Cavewights into the bone pile.

If the pile had things other than Cavewights, it could be that Covenant raised some long-dead horror from a time before the Chronicles

Spoiler

but possibly like what some of the Demondim were seen wearing when they came after Linden.

[The Somberlain]

I got the impression that he just made the old Cavewight bones sort of lift up into the air and shake and move around a bit, The Force-style, rather than actually raising anything from the dead.

[Xar]

That could be, but when he says "I raised something, I don't know what it was", he seems to imply he actually raised or created some sort of cohesive apparition...

[The Somberlain]

To me, that implies that it was more like... "I have no idea what shape it ended up taking, I just made the bones rattle around a bit."

[Nerdanel]

To me "I don't know what it was" means that it was not something random and meaningless, but that it was something coherent Covenant didn't recognize. Otherwise Covenant would have known what it was, a pile of bones temporarily animated by himself.

[matrixman]

I had never pinned much significance on whatever it was Covenant had raised, but you folks could well be right that there's more here than meets the eye. I'm bad at detecting clues in stories (which is why I generally avoid mystery novels--I usually feel like a moron afterwards).

I'm just reluctant to put too much meaning into this scene. I had also believed there was some deep meaning to the ring being in Linden's hand instead of Covenant's at the end of WGW, but apparently not--unless SRD is misdirecting us again in the GI.

[Warmark]

I always thought he ressurected Drool.
I agree Maxtrixman, i thought it was final, definite proof of the Land.

[dlbpharmd]

i thought it was final, definite proof of the Land.

So did I.

[CovenantJr]

Well it isn't

That could be, but when he says "I raised something, I don't know what it was", he seems to imply he actually raised or created some sort of cohesive apparition...

I agree. It seems to me to indicate that Covenant knew he'd revived or half-created something, but for all Covenant knew, it could have been a whale or a pot of jam as much as Drool or anything else.

I never gave it much thought at the time, since I didn't think the Chronicles were continuing. If it had no significance by the end of WGW, it had no significance at all, as far as I was aware. But now we know SRD had the Third Chronicles broadly mapped out at the time he wrote the Second, so it could well lead into something we'll see, or have seen and haven't yet made a connection to, in the new quartet.

RUNES SPOILERS:

Spoiler

Could this be the answer to that pesky question about the Mahdoubt? I don't see it being a Demondim.

[Nerdanel]

RUNES SPOILER

Spoiler

I think the Mahdoubt is a Demondim. Therefore it could be that the thing raised by Covenant ended up moving to Revelstone and becoming the Mahdoubt.

[Xar]

That was one of my theories, as well... except that I have qualms at the thought that a discharge of mostly unfocused wild magic with the single purpose of "distracting the cavewights so as to help the Giants escape by raising something from the wightbarrow" could actually summon or raise an entity with enough intelligence and cleverness as to disguise itself successfully in such a way.

Anyway, I think we all agree that if something did indeed escape Mt. Thunder this way, then whatever Covenant raised was raised through wild magic, which later evaporated, leaving the creature in a mostly-dead state; Covenant thought this meant the creature hadn't lasted long, but eventually the entity recovered and... well, what happened later is a mystery. But the way Covenant dismissed the whole incident makes me think it's more than a red herring.

[Nerdanel]

The thing is that I don't think that the unfocusedness of the wild magic had necessarily any effect on the raised thing's mental capacity. The Law of Life had been recently broken. I think Covenant brought back a dead soul and gave it a body. Possibly most of the energy would have been spent on crossing the barrier between life and death, but once that had been done, there wouldn't have been need for so much of it. Possibly the summoned thing could even have been able to get energy from its normal food. If the creature was capable of interesting ways of movement, Covenant could have thought it had expired since he could sense it no more.

Perhaps we'll see if that was the case...

[matrixman]

If this moment at the Wightbarrow turns out to be yet another instance of Covenant inadvertently screwing up the Land, and if we add all the other times that he's committed wrongs in the Land, then...it sucks to be Covenant!

Seriously, we seem to end up with a picture of a man who has "damned" the Land more often than he has "saved" it.

[Avatar]

Uh, are there two of these threads? Anyway, I vote that it was Drool that he was animating.

--A