> PS. Andre reckons:
> >Go and get "The Widow�s Tale" by Penelope Love.
> Arqua, ist a REAL Humakti,
> >IMHO
> Jane seconds the motion:
> >Seconded. In fact, get it anyway. ...
> >But Arqua is my favourite.
> And I heartily third the motion! Arqua gives a
> truly wonderful,
> cinematically perfect notion of what a Humakti
> "ambush" would have to be like.
I've just been re-reading it and enjoying that scene all over again. And it *worked*.
The other thing that struck me, having come to it from the discussions here about Devotion, was what happened to Arqua in the book. Most of the mechanics of How the Universe Works in there are very RQ2, and mechanically, one becomes a Sword (RQ equivalent of going Devotee, sort of) by a bunch of mates handing you a lot of iron goodies as a badge of rank and helping you enchant them. But narratively, there was a *lot* more to it than that.
I won't list all the details here as it would spoil most of the book for anyone who hasn't read it. The actual ceremony happens off-stage in any case: but the omens, the messages from the god, the nasty things that happen to her just by coincidence (yeah, sure) are all too obviously Humakt doing some destruct testing on a candidate. After that little lot, the ritual is just a rubber-stamp.
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