Kevin's Watch

A few things that seem certain to me having read and reread:

As has been said, Linden is making a mess of things, and the rest of the series will be devoted to showing that.

The ur-viles could have recovered the Staff of Law as easily in the present as in the past. They and the Wahynim engineered the necessity to go back in time. That had two consequences so far as they were concerned - the Wahynim survived where they would have died and the Demondin came to the present. A family reunion surely beckons.

Clearly the Esmer/Kastenessen family are also served by these developments. Foul by contrast is not necessarily the main protaganist here.

The relationship between the Demondin and their spawn and (the being who I take to be) Kastenessen seems to me to be key to understanding what is going on. Why do they heed him and Esmer? We know the Demondin and the ur-viles worked in Mount Thunder, and we know the Skurj, like the firelions, can now be seen there. Kastenessen is a figure of flame. This cannot be a coincidence.

The Demondin use the Illearth stone. Therefore either they are evil or everything we have been told before is wrong. The ur-viles by contrast seem neither good nor evil. The Wahynim are, it seems, good. Yet they seem to be collectively acting out the same script. Esmer also seems to be playing out some good/evil balance. So this script is probably something beyond good and evil and which all those player are signed up to.

We know that events have been set in motion by Foul which will most likely lead to the destruction of the Land. So this script is probably a response to that - something that will either preserve the land (unlikely) or (more likely) allow something to emerge from the ashes. As with the creation of Vain, the Demondin and their spawn are playing the long game.

So what is this script? What can destroy the land and then resurrect it. The only thing that makes sense to me is the destruction and rebuilding of the arch, once Foul is gone. That requires a new cycle, with a new creator, and, one must acknowledge, a new despiser to give meaning to it all. But who will they be?

Nominations on a postcard please.

native wrote:...Foul by contrast is not necessarily the main protaganist here...

...allow something to emerge from the ashes. As with the creation of Vain, the Demondin and their spawn are playing the long game...

Good points Native...Some very interesting speculation in the second one I quoted.

--A

Still I would imagine that Foul, having learned from his past mistake, wouldn't allow the ur-viles or any others to play the same sort of game they played with Vain in the Second Chronicles... SRD told us that Foul gets smarter all the time, and it makes sense that he wouldn't allow these creatures to covertly plot against him as they did in the SC.

Fair enough, but he's not omniscient or anything. How could he stop them if he didn't know?

--A

Well the Creator wouldnt want his creation destroyed and rebuilt, or he would have done so already. Even beings like Esmer and Kastenessen would have nothing to gain. The Elohim are of the Earth and would surely be destroyed as would every other creature on the Earth other than Foul. In fact who is to say Foul would survive the destruction of the arch? perhaps he has been within it so long that he has becomes an integral part of its structure. After all, good cannot exist without despite and vice versa. Perhaps Foul himself may realise this and be forced into being an unwilling saviour of the Earth?

If there are new focal points of good and evil here, with Kastenessen assumed to be the evil, is the Mahdoubt the good?

I don't doubt that the Urviles and Waynhim have ulterior motives other than survival though.

KAY1 wrote:Even beings like Esmer and Kastenessen would have nothing to gain. The Elohim are of the Earth and would surely be destroyed as would every other creature on the Earth other than Foul.

That's quite possibly not true.

In [u]The Runes of the Earth[/u] was wrote:Stars, she had heard, were the bright children of the world's birth, the glad offspring of the Creator, trapped inadvertently in the heavens by the same binding that had imprisoned the Despiser. They could only be set free, restored to their infinite home, by the severing of Time. Hence their crystalline keening: they mourned for the lost grandeur of eternity.

The Elohim are self-described as "the direct offspring of the creation of the Earth". The bright children of the world's birth.

So would the Elohim "surely be destroyed"? Or would they be set free, restored to their infinite home?

Hmm maybe so, but there were a couple of different throries of Creation so I guess it would depend which was the most accurate. They all had similarities but there were some differences. But if that was true, why would the Elohim have striven for so long to preserve the Earth?

Perhaps Kastennesen had gone a bit nuts up there capping the volcano for ages and believed his own press that he was some sort of supreme being who should rightly be floating among the stars and to hell with everyone else!

Xar wrote:I would imagine that Foul, having learned from his past mistake, wouldn't allow the ur-viles or any others to play the same sort of game they played with Vain

He might not want to stop them. The Demondin may well be planning to help destroy the arch as part of their plan. Once Foul's free and has White Gold, he may not care if there is a new recreation afterwards. Hell, he may be planning to trap the creator inside it for a joke. Maybe he already has, given the holes in the arch we now have thanks to Joan.

Just a thought, but it occurs to me that we should perhaps look at Creation and the Creator as "a" Creation and "a" Creator, rather than "the" Creation/Creator.

We are told that Foul, the Elohim, etc, are trapped inside the Arch of time, ie in the Land, but what are they cut off from? There must be (at least grammatically) somewhere else and since the only somewhere else we know of is the "real world" and Foul and the Elohim are not from here, they must be from somewhere else: what else is out there?

SRD has stated that he wants to explore Foul the bad guy; what makes him a bad guy and what makes him tick. To accomplish this we might also have to look at where he is from so that we can understand the relative value of what/who has influenced him to this end.

That would be great...I'd love to see more back-story on Foul.

--A

Introducing... Lord Foul's mother! "Young cosmological entity, did you do your homework? You'll never become a good Despiser if you just go out and play with your friend the Creator... he's bad company, I tell ya!"

I saw him on E! True Hollywood Story. I hear he posed for some nude pictures before he got famous. heh.

Actually he's really Glen Miller. He's been trapped inside the arch of time for 50 earth years, which is 15,000 Land years and he went loopy after the first 200.

(it's just struck me how unlike a laughing person that face looks)