[the Block and the West]
> I'm sure it still is depending who is telling the story.
Good point. Is it fair to infer that whenever the story involves "Law" or calls "Truestone" by name, there's a Western influence there?
The Praxians probably emphasize the Spike, since they remember that part.
Maybe the Western layer is mostly speculation on the part of latter-day tourists. Or maybe they actually had additional pieces of the puzzle.
Funny how much we learn about the West in Cults of Prax, by the way. Even the Daka Fal write has the odd note qualifying the limited role of that cult on the Plaines:
(Such was the situation in Prax, anyway. Other distant lands [such as Seshneg in the Dawn ages] developed this form of worship until they made their ancestors surpass the mighty gods in power, or else reduced the immortals into mere superhuman heroes or multi-national ancestors. Such developments are outside the immediate scope of this book.)
And now all this Issaries stuff rises to the surface.
> Genert gave his name the whole of the Northern continent. The death of it's founder would have effected everyone on it.
I like this for a different reason than most of the close history I've been pushing lately. This kind of statement gets us back to the old, old days when we could say with a straight face that in Kralorela they worshipped "Yelm" and "Dendara."
If everyone on the continent knew that the great god Genert was dead, that's a somewhat different proposition than saying most Great Darkness survivors didn't even know the sun was shining until the Theyalan missionaries reached them to say it was so.
Of course both propositions are true and we need to keep both alive.
> He didn't have to bring the bits to her, just put him back together. Everyone would know he had succeeded.
Another good point. I was reading current wisdom about the Trader Princes back into that fragment. The Trader Princes back then meant something a little different, maybe an Issaries-dominated society or cult role. Selling your hyena skins to the Desert Trackers of the Trader Princes meant passing them on to a specialized, more "rune-level" Issaries colleague to take to Prax, not handing it to a rival syndicate for mysterious safekeeping (as I initially jumped at).
Issaries is very, very old in Prax. He saw the Paps created. He's truly a cult "of" Prax and not just "in" Prax like Orlanth, Yelmalio and so on. In so far as he's a cult "of" anywhere.
Garzeen at least was familiar enough with the West to have a Dawn Age Seshnegi princess figured into his myth. Her dates are perhaps unfortunately specific. No Dawn Age connection between Prax and Seshnela, no truth to the myth, in which case the myth actually points to something else.
And far afield, we know the God With The Silver Feet is dead. Maybe the Trader Princes were always quasi-Western quasi-Issaries who monopolized the overland route.
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