> > Although that is surely a God Learner belief (I can just imagine
the
> > Malkioni pouring contempt on the non-Malkioni survivors of the
> > Darkness), I don't think that the non-Lightbringer survivors of
the
> > Darkness were "brain-damaged". They just couldn't see or
understand
> > that the Great Darkness was over. I remember one story where
they
> > couldn't even see the Sun in the sky.
> Exactly. Their brains were damaged. Or their eyes, though that
seems
> unlikely. In this case, they'd lost the ability to understand and
to learn -
> brains.
I don't think that is the case. They understood how to survive the
Darkness, perhaps by cannibalism, or by offering every third child
to the trolls, or by eating only the hallucinagenic arpa root, or
whatever it is that they did. They could survive the Darkness, but
perhaps as a result, they could not perceive that the Darkness had
ended. The Lightbringers taught them that the Darkness had ended
and the Dawn had come.
Jeff