=<< Another model for the Puzzle Canal could be the waters of the Underworld (sailed many years later by the Black Fleet of the Lunars). It'd be a lot safer to conduct certain rituals without actually having to sail to the Underworld!>>
So the cradle goes down the pool to Hell and maybe pops up again in the Canal to be plundered again. Or, alternatively, Cradle Robbers who missed it as it passed could catch up with it in Hell, on the Puzzle Canal.
From Magastas Mythos:
"From the Last Silence came the First Drop, the inky underworld ocean
called Styx, which was both motionless and ever changing at once."
Good fit for the Canal, I must say.
<<This might let you maintain its mysteriousness. "We know that this canal needs to lead to a pool of Green Oil, but we don't know what lurks there.">>
I think the Oceans have enough mysteriousness of their own, enough scary places and monsters, demons and spirits lurking in dark-wetness.
If "person" is changed to Canal in the following bit of Magasta mythos:
"Each person is like a current in the ever-flowing mass of the sea. Some
are large and strong, some weak, but all have a beginning, and all
ultimately end."
<< And of course suggests that the Canal might have to be renovated several times as new information is learned from heroquesters. Which of course leads to workmen being lost as they go in to dredge or dam...>>
My current premise is that the architect has hundreds of plans, one for each year, in effect a 3D maze, where one dimension is time. Not sure if this makes sense, I was thinking that it could just echo the current state (pun intended) of the oceans. In effect it would have general rules (mostly counterclockwise, only a couple of routes to the Hidden Depths) but would change in unknown ways like the oceans and like their dark hidden currents.
Somehow this bit of Magasta mythology fits with the Sea Slaver, the demon at the centre of the canal, Not sure whether the Seaslaver is a Magasta analog, or the demon is Robber, or they are twisted perversions of them, but I think, somehow, it fits the Canal:
"Like stagnant pools they stood, bewildered and unhappy. Magasta took
those lost souls of the sea, and sent, led, and carried them through the
Hidden Stream back into the First Drop, a mystery beyond the
understanding of all but those gods who have drunk of Daliath's Well.
Magasta then sought and confronted a terrible creature which wielded
Death. He defeated it, and made the thing his slave. It became Magasta's
invisible Net of the Sea which drags all eventually into death. The new slave
was renamed Robber, and rules over the lost souls which live in the sea
but are not in its flow."
Keith
--__--__--
Powered by hypermail