On Fri, 1 Nov 2013, Phil Hibbs wrote:
> What I was getting at was the similarity in names between Ralzakark on the
> one hand, and Balarzak, hardral and Arkat. I first assumed that the name
> (and therefore the creature) Ralzakark was constructed from fragments of
> those names. But if Ralzakark pre-dated the other three, then the causal
> relationship runs in the other direction (if you can trust causality to
> behave in such circumstances, that is). Were Hardral and Balarzak drawn to
> Dorastor, unknowingly bearing the scattered fragments of Ralzakark's soul
> within them, to re-unite him?
Balarzak's sinister demise before 827 demonstrates the penalties of digging too deep into the chaos nest. Whether he and his people were somehow "collected" into Ralzakark or simply punished for seeing too much, YGWV. The person who intrigues me as "patient zero" in the rebirth of Dorastor is the unnamed female scholar who "theorized that Arkat had hidden the key to the Dark Empire's power beneath his curse of Dorastor."
Note that sources agree that the Curse of Cleansing did not generate the perverse forms of the land of doom but instead blasted it bare: no ruins, no ghosts, no fertility, no undead. Arkat almost completely erased the land of his shadow and then left. If the theory was true, this erasure was the foundation of his later career and the empire the Seshnegi hated.
Now the reactivation of life in Dorastor essentially breaks the curse and appears to coincide with the uncanny collapse of the Stygian Empire. The recovery is relatively vague -- "eighth century," culiminating in the greasefire of 800 -- but I wonder if that initial female scholar's expedition didn't set out sometime in the immediate post-crusade period of eradicating every possible Arkati trace to prevent reprisals. Pencil in maybe 745, 750 for her. May be later, may even be earlier. Either way, they never came back. Orlanthi flyovers over the next few decades start reporting something unusual.
So what I wonder is whether any real return of the Stygian Empire would have to entail a cleansing of Dorastor -- impossible under normal circumstances -- and whether people should be looking for Ralzakark's mother, not his two to three dads.
Did we ever get a bead on the live God Learners he has up at Wrath?
Where do female broos really come from?
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